In the end, the most potent trend on display was the unabashed embrace of alternative interfaces: Microsoft’s Project Natal, Sony’s Wand and Nintendo’s Wii Vitality Sensor. Yet the camera announcements didn’t quite wow me as much as they did many of the other conference attendees, not because they weren’t inspiring, but because I’ve long been familiar with depth-perception cameras. During a 2002 visit to Sony Computer Entertainment America’s Northern California headquarters, the same Dr Richard Marks who took the stage this June to demo the Sony Wand showed me his company’s experiments with 3D cameras and a cruder version of the Wand. Five years later, I met with 3dv Systems (whose technology has been rumoured to have been acquired by Microsoft) both at E3 2007 and later that year in my New York City offices, where the founders assured me that its cameras would be in stores by the end of 2008 at a reasonable price. Needless to say, it didn’t happen.
A number of publishing CEOs, analysts and journalists that I spoke with saw in these announcements proof that the console manufacturers would rather extend the current generation via peripherals and firmware updates than hasten the start of the next generation. If that’s the case, those CEOs and their developers will almost certainly breathe a sigh of relief. During a panel that I co-moderated at the New York Comic-Con in February, when asked how they would respond if Microsoft and Sony privately approached them to develop games for the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox 1080 in advance of a next-gen console unveiling at the Game Developers Conference or E3, 2K Boston/Australia creative director Ken Levine (BioShock) and Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard (Fallout 3) both said that they would reply, “Good luck with that”, and decline to jump in right away. The twin implications of their shared spurning? That devs’ practical visions are not yet being bounded by the current tech; and that the precariousness of the current business model might not survive the heedless suicide of the installed-base reset that accompanies a newly launched machine.
It’s easy to see how the new input devices will benefit certain genres, like party games and especially fitness games, a category whose growth shows little sign of slowing. But as the founder of one publisher-owned developer told me, the three forthcoming interfaces are sufficiently different as to further fragment the market (to say nothing of their as-yet-nonexistent installed bases). Yes, a killer app can drive a peripheral’s success, as SingStar, Buzz!, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Wii Sports, Wii Play, Wii Fit and Mario Kart have proven. But neither Microsoft, nor Nintendo, nor Sony demonstrated anything resembling a killer app for these add-ons during their E3 2009 press conferences. And if thirdparties are as wary about Natal, the Vitality Sensor and the Wand as I believe they’ll be, our new interface overlords shouldn’t expect to be greeted as liberators in the short term.
So while the new peripherals are undoubtedly my Breast Physics Award winners for 2009, the more significant announcements to my mind were those surrounding Twitter and Facebook coming to consoles, with only Sony’s absence preventing social media integration from taking my award. As retailers continue to cut back on inventory levels and the number of titles they carry, and as digitally distributed games on consoles still in many cases struggle to find a paying audience of sufficient size along the long tail, word-of-mouth marketing becomes increasingly important.
That’s at heart what Twitter and Facebook are: opt-in word-of-mouth marketing engines with an elevated level of trust built in to their social DNA. After all, these recommendations are coming from people you’ve elected to follow, and whose opinions you presumably value. And just as developers and publishers of games for browsers and iPhones are leveraging the growing ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter, it’s become clear to me that the blending of our gaming identities (Gamertag, PlayStation Network ID, Friend Code) with our more multipurpose social media identities (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace) is not only inevitable but essential to the survival and growth of the modern game industry. More on this in the months ahead.
N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com.