Category Archives: E3 2008

Speaking to GI at E3 last week, Sony boss Kaz Hirai was careful to include caveats in the company’s current plan to make the Home beta available this autumn.

“I’ve said this on many occasions, and right now we’re aiming for a Fall open beta programme, but no beta should be opened before its time,” he said.

“It’s important enough of an initiative for the platform and for SCE, that we don’t want to prematurely launch it and then be dinged for having a bad service.”

There’ll be blood if it misses, Kaz. There’s a full interview with the exec here.

Seems like not a day goes by without an article about Take-Two and EA sitting in a tree. But even amidst all of the commentary, in an interview with VentureBeat, EA CEO John Riccitiello was nonchalant about his company’s current prey.

“I don’t care if people write about Take-Two,” he said. “It doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is that the best developers want to work for EA. That the best games are published by EA. And we’re making progress toward that goal. I hope we’ll be more successful in years to come. We’ll be on top of a gigantic wave. Having clever verbal sword play about Take-Two doesn’t really matter. I’m not really playing for a headline in the New York Times.”

He added: “There have basically been three moves and there have 6,000 articles on it. It’s sort of amusing. I feel a little bit like those strobe light things where it looks like a guy is moving a lot. The flash goes off but the body doesn’t move. Every time a flash goes off, somebody writes a story on it. To be honest with you, the last time there was news was a couple of months ago.”

The man isn’t afraid to be upfront. Is it too early to declare him “Everybody’s Favorite Executive”?

By Nathan Grayson

Speaking to VentureBeat at E3 last week, EA head John Riccitiello was blunt about how the investment community is clueless about his well documented drive for higher review scores.

“I don’t think the investors give a shit about our quality,” he said. “They care about our earnings per share. They wait for it to happen. We had three years where we didn’t make our expectations. If I were an investor, I would wait and see. That’s fine with me.”

He issued another “fuck you” comment to investors in the interview, saying that BioWare/Pandemic, specifically, is on track to deliver high quality in the coming years.

“We are meeting our internal plan,” he said. “We have great software from [BioWare/Pandemic]. We’ve got a massively multiplayer online game coming, which we haven’t announced. It could be very lucrative for us. We got a really positive reaction to Dragon Age. We’ve got games like Saboteur in the works. We’ve got Mass Effect 2 coming. Some of it is 2009 software.

“If you’re stuck on the fact that the stock is at $45, I can’t really help you.”

Full thing through the link. Well worth a read.

GTTV’s Geoff Keighley, apparently completely oblivious to the fact Nintendo boss Reggie Fils-Aime’s obviously getting annoyed, puts up a commendable barrage of hardcore-related questions to the company front man in a three-part video interview after the break, shot just after he came off the E3 stage last week.

There was an immediate backlash after the conference, during which Nintendo showed no core games at all aside from a new version of Animal Crossing.

“You keep trying to date me, you know,” Reggie said after Keighley continuely tried to get solid information on new Mario and Zelda titles. “My girlfriend’s going to get upset. You keep trying to date me. You can’t do that.”

Watch it. It’s funny.

More »

Jesus wept. We were told a dozen times last week that the LA Convention Center was a tad morgue-ish for E3, but we never expected this. Joystiq’s posted up some photos of the Center’s entrance hall, and anyone familiar with the “old show” will be shocked. What the hell is that?

We don’t have the words. Well, we do, but we’ve already said what we think. Vegas. Consumer. Or dead. Hit the link to see why.

Nintendo’s Cammie Dunaway has addressed “concerns” that the incredible smile she wore during the company’s E3 press conference last week may not have been as sincere as it appeared.

“I’m really a genuinely smiley, nice person,” the exec told Wired. “Because people think I’m fake, smiling up there. I’m just not. It’s just me. I am who I am.”

There’s more through there on pleasing the hardcore, etc. Read away.

There’s a video after the break, seemingly shot at E3, of Major Nelson showing Netflix working with the Xbox 360 UI revamp, Xbox Experience.

It looks pretty neat, truth be told, with users able to start watching their Netflix movies virtually instantly – why wasn’t this trumpeted in the conference? – and invite Friends to view films as they play.

Great if you’re American, obviously, but there’s no news on anything like this even being planned for European launch.

Watch it anyway. Netflix will be available through the new 360 dashboard this autumn.

More »

Speaking to the BBC, Guerilla’s Hermen Hulst has shown Killzone 2 in its final stages of development and said the shooter’s simply all about the action.

“Killzone 2, to me, is essentially an incredible adrenaline rush,” he said, speaking at E3 last week. “It’s a very dense, intense,action-packed first-person shooter game.”

He added: “I think taking this game, this franchise to PlayStation 3 allows us to create the game we’ve always wanted. When I talk about ‘action-packed,’ I mean creating a full theatre of war.”

There’s a full video interview through the link.

Speaking to Videogamer at E3 last week, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford’s questioned Sony’s constant delaying of Home, saying gamers should have been using the online service by now.

“I don’t understand why I don’t have it yet,” he said. “Shouldn’t we have had it already? When did we first hear about it? A year-and-a-half ago? What’s the deal? I think they’re trying to bite off a lot there and make it really, really complicated, and I agree with some of the intent behind it, but we need a very simple, quick way to do what they’re offering.”

More sniping through the link.

Signal Hill’s Todd Greenwald has issued a damning statement on Microsoft’s E3 360 price adjustment today, saying that it’s not enough to differentiate the machine from PlayStation 3 in the US.

“We remain very sceptical of Microsoft’s pricing strategy and competitive positioning versus the PlayStation 3,” said the analyst in a research note.

“At $349, with a 60Gb hard drive, we just don’t think it is a compelling product compared with the PS3 at $399 with an 80Gb hard drive (along with more processing horsepower, Blu-ray, Wifi, HDMI, and going forward, more exclusive content),” he offered.

“We’d also note that the Xbox 360 has just been surpassed by the Wii in the US, despite Microsoft’s one year head start over Nintendo.

“We do think that the Netflix announcement is a significant addition for Xbox users, though its far more of a positive for Netflix than it is for Microsoft in our opinion.”

Microsoft dropped the price of the 20Gb US 360 SKU and announced a new, 60Gb machine just before E3 last week.

On Joystiq. They’re camera stills taken during an E3 presentation of Home, but they’re easily good enough. Take a look.

Speaking to MTV, Resident Evil 5 producer Jun Takeuchi has yet again answered questions on the subject of racial stereotyping in the game, and has said that members of the development team are black.

Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal had previously opined, “Clearly no one black worked on this game,” again in an MTV interview.

“We were quite surprised by the reaction that came out. I think everyone understands that we never set out to with the intention to make anything that was racist — that was never our intention. We think it was a bit of a misunderstanding when we published the first images of the game back in the day,” said Takeuchi, speaking at E3 last week.

“And we think that as we move along and allow people to see more the game and more of what’s going on and more of the story, people will get a better idea of the game. I think you can see that that reaction has started to die down a little bit. To answer the question that was posted on your blog, there are black members in the development team. We do have staff working on the game, who are aware of the historical background and we are constantly checking these kinds of things with them.”

Full thing through the first link.

Speaking to Eurogamer at E3 last week, Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux admitted that a future MMO project may be on the cards.

“I have been looking at MMOs,” he said. “I love the interaction, and I’m fascinated by the idea of really feeling secure and cool enough to actually do it.”

Molyneux was speaking after telling the show’s Microsoft press conference that anticipated RPG Fable II is now complete.

Don’t do it, Peter. World o’ pain.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has just issued a statement echoing sentiments from EA’s John Riccitiello, Ubisoft’s Alain Corre and Acclaim’s Dave Perry in saying that E3 is… buggered.

“In our view, E3 is headed for extinction, unless the publishers and console manufacturers wake up to the fact that nobody cares about the show anymore,” said Pachter.

“We believe that show is ill-timed, coming after most major holiday announcements are out, and landing during ‘quiet period’ for most of the companies (making meetings with investors near-impossible).

The lack of a spectacle will likely keep media away in the future, the lack of surprises will keep retailers away, and the lack of interaction with management will likely keep investors away. Without these three constituencies, the show will likely lose its relevance.

“We strongly believe that E3 should be held no later than early June (when companies can meet with investors and when some ‘secrets’ have yet to be revealed), and believe that the spectacle should be restored by increasing the size of the show space.”

Vegas. Massive consumer show. Trade days first. Obvious.

E3′s provided enough drama in the past week to last the American games industry a lifetime, and the criticism is both heavy and relentless in the aftermath. Is the show relevant any more? Is there even a point in trying to change it? We sat down with Eurogamer.net editor Tom Bramwell and talked over the issues surrounding the event. Sorry for the sound quality. If you want us to do this again we’ll buy a couple of microphones, or something.

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Speaking to GI, Shiny founder David Perry has branded E3 in its current format as “broken”, “stupid” and an “embarrassment.”

“I’ve got to agree with the comment by John Riccitiello, about E3. If there aren’t dramatic changes to the format and staff, I’m never going again,” he said.

“The concept is broken, it’s expensive, messages are diluted, consumers are ignored (remembering that the future of this industry is direct connections with consumers – not retailers), the ticket policies are stupid, and if the entire industry worldwide doesn’t participate, it’s not real anyway.”

Perry added: “I used to bring major investors to E3 to get them excited about our industry, which worked every time. Now it’s just an embarrassment.

“Thankfully we still have GDC to bring them to, if they want to see the talent, passion, and energy this industry has.”

More through the link.

The Major’s posted up his E3 podcast, and it contains a ton of information on the Xbox 360 dashboard revamp, Xbox Experience. This is pretty much essential listening for anyone with a passing interest in the machine, as he goes into detail on party-forming and funtionality, the Netflix deal announced at the show, and heaps more. It’s an hour long, but worth a listen.

Speaking to the FT at E3, Sony boss Kaz Hirai has said that his target is for PlayStation 3 sales to exceed PlayStation 2 figures, now sitting at 140 million after nine years.

“It’s not fun for me replicating the PS2 numbers. I’ve seen that movie already,” he said.

“I want to try to see if we can exceed the PS2 numbers after nine years, otherwise why are we in this business?”

Sony told E3 attendees last week that sales of its original PlayStation, launched in 1994, had reached 102 million units and that PS2 had now passed 140 million worldwide in its ninth year on sale.

More through the link.

On PlanetXbox360, as snapped at E3. As previously reported, the EA Sports exec has had his face modelled for the cartoony fighter, giving you the change to go toe-to-toe with the marathon-running games industry superman when it releases in early September. He’s a good sport, Peter.

Massive Action Game, while certainly an apt description of Sony’s 256-player action title, isn’t the punchiest moniker we’ve ever heard. Luckily, according to an insider who contacted Kotaku, the game’s current ID may soon be a thing of the past.

The source was apparently part of a focus group that saw the game a month or so before E3. They claim that the game may sport one of a few potential taglines, such as “Shadow War,” “Zero,” “Global War,” or “Final Hour.” Since Zipper Interactive, erstwhile developer of the SOCOM series, is slaving away at MAG, the insider believes it’s not much of a stretch to expect a new SOCOM title to be the end result of the whole deal. More telling, he says that Zipper used images from SOCOM 3 as visual examples of the possibilities that MAG offers.

In addition, the blab-prone focus tester detailed MAG’s rank system, which allows players to eventually reach a near RTS-like state of omniscient power – even allowing those high-ranked players to set objectives for their team.

For even more in-depth details about MAG, click the link.

By Nathan Grayson