On Friday, UK publication MCV reported that the future of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the game industry’s biggest annual trade event, is under discussion by the Entertainment Software Association and major publishers. According to unnamed insiders, many publishers feel that the event has gotten far too big and unwieldy, not to mention costly. “Costs have been getting out of hand. We’re talking double digit millions for some of us,” said an MCV source. “But that’s not just floorspace, of course - it’s build, parties, hotels, flights. Security, particularly, has become a massive cost.
“Today, the plot thickened, as both Next Generation and GameSpot are reporting that the event will no longer exist at all in its current form. Next Generation, currently running the headline “EXCLUSIVE: E3 FINISHED,” claims that the ESA’s Doug Lowenstein will announce within 48 hours that E3 has been cancelled for 2007 and beyond. “The days of an industry event attended by all the major publishers, spending big money, are gone,” reads the article. GameSpot reports that there may be a smaller industry event around the same time as E3, though it will not be held in E3’s traditional home base, the Los Angeles Convention Center. Such an event would support hundreds rather than thousands of attendees, and would be a more subdued preview event rather than a full-blown three-day industry party. GameSpot claims that the ESA will make its announcement tomorrow.
If this turns out to be the end of E3.. it will be a sad sad day indeed. E3 was the balls - out BEST show around. We should have known that with the booth babes being subdued, the end had to be near.*sniff* goodbye E3.. we barely knew ye.
So Slashdot has informed us that Quake is 10. Thats pretty cool. Whats even cooler is this wikipedia entry, and accompanying picture that shows the quake engine and its offspring.
Long live the King.
“Late on 22nd June 1996 Quake was uploaded to cdrom.com’s archives in the form of 7 1.44MB floppy disk images. Though it wasn’t until the 23rd that everyone realised (or at least, that’s my excuse for being a day late with the news submission). Cue much aggravation on the newsgroups as eager downloaders experienced glorious 2 FPS gameplay.”
Slashdot pointed me to this cool article today. Its showing the wiimote in action with all the games that were played at E3. Nice to see it. It will be even better to FEEL it.
he movies shown here feature each and every Wii game at E3, with footage showing how they are played using the Wii-mote. These videos really bring the Wii to life, so check them out!
Gamespot has some of the skinny on the new faction in the Empire At War expansion. EAW was and is wonderul, and this new faction sounds sweet. Perhaps a little bit “Prince Xizor“, but a lapse in originalitiy does not mean it won’t rock.
After spending countless hours refining the powers of “corruption,” we’re ready to share some of the sinister details that make the Underworld faction unique to Star Wars: Empire at War. Before I get started, here’s a quick overview of our new playable faction. The Underworld is comprised of a network of thieves, mercenaries, and some of the most corrupt bounty hunters in the galaxy. They’ve been brought together under the will of Tyber Zann, a crime lord who after many years in the spice mines of Kessel, has been unleashed on the Galaxy. His goal is a simple one–to take back his empire that had been seized by the Hutt cartel and to gain control of all criminal activities in the galaxy.
This really was just a matter of time. I mean, we all knew that EA has been wanting to have its very own MMORPG studio. Its really the only major horse that EA has been missing from its stables. All we can hope now, is that the acquisition will help give Mythic access to greater resources (helping out an already great game studio) instead of the bureacracy of a larger uber-corporation stifling the smaller company.
Ever since the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft was released in fall 2004, Electronic Arts has looked on with envy as rival Vivendi has raked in millions. In March, the French media conglomerate’s game division–which lost 203 million euros ($241 million) in 2004–reported a whopping 244 million euro ($289.9 million) one-year jump in earnings for the calendar year 2005.
The jump in revenue was thanks largely to WOW, which is developed and published by Vivendi subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment. The game now has over 6.5 million subscribers worldwide, filling the company’s coffers with a hefty regular revenue of gold.
Not one to let an unexploited market pass it by, Electronic Arts today announced that it has entered an agreement to acquire the Virginia-based development studio Mythic Entertainment. The new studio will be renamed EA Mythic, and it will focus on producing MMORPGs. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The 7:00 minute Produced move features the designers and producers of Halo 3. The movie is centered around the game’s story (Halo 2 spoilers), graphic technology, and cool marketing drum beats. Enjoy!
Back in November we posted a story that Sony filed for a patent that would burn a code into PS 3 disks coupling them from to only that console. Smartly enough, we named the article “Sony Files a Patent to End Used Games“. Damn, that’s to the point. But at that time everything was purely speculation - we all know that corporations patent every idea under the sun, even if they don’t intend on using it, and there wasn’t anything that matched this crazy patent to the PS3.
But now we’re seeing some ripple effects that link this crappy patent to the PS3. From Games Radar:
High street games shops have been told by Sony that there will be no PS3 pre-owned sections in their stores as it will be illegal for customers to sell any next-gen PlayStation games that they’ve bought, retail sources have revealed to GamesRadar.
Why would Sony do such a thing? Because Sony Entertinament makes zero dollars on used games sales, and they see that as a huge hole of lost profits.
This patent also means that you won’t be able to rent games (unless they make a specific format for rental companies), and you won’t be able to bring a game to a friend’s house for gaming-night. Well you can if you lug your PS3 with you - which is rumored to be 11 pounds.
Due to some spam attacks that are ongoing against this site, We are suspending email transmission of stories.
We know that this may dismay some of you, and we know everyone enjoys getting the stories delievered to our inboxes, but the jerkhole spammers of the world are making life hard for us and we need to find a better, more secure solution to stop them.
We recently hooked up Monkeygames to be a feed on FeedBurner, which is a blog feed agregation service. Until I can obtain a more secure mailing system, i reccommend obtaining a (free) feed reading utility, and then subscribing to our feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Monkeygames . This will provide a similar “push” mechanism to what we had working with the emails.
This notice also serves to let you know that we may experience downtime this week, as in order to combat the spamholes, we will be upgrading the site to a newer version of Wordpress, and possibly taking other measures to keep the site clean from spam.
So wish us luck. Hang in there, and we’ll have this all done as soon as we can.
Looks pretty good, certainly not the powerhouse like the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3 but still good specs. I do have to admit I think the internal flash memory of 512MB is a bit low. Definitely a concern point for me especially since the market is being driven to have more downloadable content and game updates. Anyhow read on for the specs.
GameSpot Is now reporting that the ESRB has changed the rating of the PC version of Oblivion from “T” to “M” (teen to mature).
All this because deep in one of the art archives of the game, there is a texture that has a topless female (i.e. nipples).
This is yet another rediculous rating change. The game has to be MODDED to access this content.. so why would that mean the game deserves a higher rating.
I mean.. its the equivalent of saying that a book is indecent because I can re-arrange the letters to form a dirty scentence.
Well, lets hope this doesnt get as annoyingly out of control as that *other* censorship debacle did.
E3: "Entertainment”, “Expo”, “Extinct”
Back in November we posted a story that Sony filed for a patent that would burn a code into PS 3 disks coupling them from to only that console. Smartly enough, we named the article “
