Okay, here's my final meme-blog on E-3 2003, now that the show is over and my ears have stopped ringing (at least somewhat). And as usual, my caveat to my game industry colleagues: I am not official press -- this is just my own stream of thought rambling, so please take anything I say with a grain of salt. (Part 1 of my E-3 report, btw, is here: http://www.memestreams.net/users/elonka/blogid2927350 )

First, to get it out of the way, here's some more name-dropping about other colleagues that I ran across over the last couple days. The famous, not-so-famous, or just plain cool: Dave Perry (Shiny/Matrix), Richard Garfield (Magic), Johnny Wilson, John de Margheriti (MicroForte Australia), Marc Mencher, Alexander Macris (Themis), Rob Nicholls (Cybiko), Liz Wakefield (IGDA), Christopher Allen (Skotos), Bridget Goldstein, Daniel Greenberg, Patricia Pizer (Ubi Soft), Michael Gartenberg (Jupiter), and Tim Innes (S2 Games).

Now, getting back to the show floor . . . In terms of the major MMORPGs, many of the ones that were touted as being "in development" last year, are now in the process of being released, or are at a state where they can at least be demoed at these shows. I saw demos of Star Wars: Galaxies (Sony), Second Life (Linden Labs), Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (Square Enix), Mu Online (claiming to be the largest MMORPG in the world, with over 350,000 simultaneous players at peak), Myst Online, and several others. There was quite a bit of discussion about the difficulty of porting the hit games from one continent to another. For example, the Korean market has the largest games in the world in terms of Peak Simultaneous Users, but none of those games has yet caught on in the U.S. or European markets. Ditto with the U.S. games into the Asian markets. But one American game, Dark Age of Camelot, did manage to make the crossover from the U.S. to Europe, and is a big hit there, even reportedly being the #1 MMORPG in Europe. They're currently claiming 220,000 total subscribers (worldwide) with 60,000 PSU (Peak Simultaneous Users).

Factoid: Sony's EverQuest is stating that 16% of their userbase is female. In terms of gaining new users (of both genders), EQ says that 70% of their new customers are there because of a peer recommendation. They also said that at the EverQuest "Fan Faires", 80% of the attendees are players of the game.

A representative from EA had an interesting comment on their marketing focus. They said that they're finding they need to target the "game expert" in each community's circle of friends. In other words, that most game players around the country base their game-buying decisions not on marketing or even on magazine reviews, but on the recommendation of some member of their circle of friends (EA calls this person "Sydney") who's the guy or girl who plays nearly every game out there, and then recommends games to their friends. So if EA can successfully convince the "Sydneys" out there that a game is good, and get "the Sydney recommendation," then other people will buy the game as well.

Factoid: Sony's PlanetSide, which opened for beta over the weekend, reportedly pulled in 32,000 users.

"The Sims'" (single-player version) market is reportedly 60% female (though the person who said that number also said that they've sold 15 million units, which conflicts with the numbers reported this year in the L.A. Times, which said 8 million core units, and 24 million units including expansion packs).

Square Enix's new "Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles" game will allow 4 people to plug their GBA handhelds into a GameCube, and play cooperatively, with each player getting private information that's unique to their character on their own GBA, which they can choose to share or not. This sounded intriguing, so I definitely wanted to check it out. The graphics on this game did appear more low-end, and when I and an associate tried to play the demo at E-3, the controls were so non-intuitive that we couldn't do anything more than walk in a circle around the screen. Despite the disappointing demo though, I still have hopes for this game, as there are so few console titles which allow for multiplayer cooperative play -- I'm definitely willing to encourage anything which has the potential of games such as the 4-player "Gauntlet" or the quirky but fun two-player "Toejam & Earl".

In terms of cool gadgets at E-3 this year, I was most impressed by the "EyeToy" camera in the Sony booth. They had about 5 different simple games to demo, that were played by having the user wave their arms or move their body. For example, one of the mini-games displayed a dirty windshield which needed to be cleaned by waving your arms to get all the spots. Another was a martial arts mini-game where you needed to hit monsters that were popping out of the side of the screen. Another was a volleyball game, where you used your hands or head to hit a volleyball in such a way that it would hit the monsters. Another was a rocket/fireworks display, where you had to reach your hand to touch colored rockets as they rose into the sky, and then press a switch to blow them up and generate a fireworks display. You got more points if you touched all the rockets of a certain color at once, and avoided other colors, and I found it both fun and pretty.

Another interesting gadget down in Kentia Hall (which is usually the best place in E-3 to go see the really original stuff) was a half keyboard, that was configured in such a way that a touch typist could type all characters on the keyboard with just one hand. It was very intuitive, since it mapped the right hand characters onto the lefthand keyboard, but backwards... So, for example, if you wanted to type an "s" you'd use the ring finger of the lefthand as usual, and if you wanted to type an "l", you'd hold down the space bar with your left thumb, and use the ring finger of your left hand to type the "l" that way. I tried it, and it was usable within a few minutes of practice.

Another game that was difficult to categorize, but looked interesting and was getting some favorable buzz, was S2 Games' "Savage", a multiplayer team-based game, with both RTS and first-player shooter elements (they're describing their new genre as RTSS - Real-Time Strategy Shooter). Though I only saw it briefly on the show floor, it's one of the games that made my "Elonka wants to try this herself later" list.

Also on the "Elonka wants" list is the next version in the Myst series, "Uru." I still have my doubts as to how compelling the online version is going to be, but it's probably something that I'm going to check out anyway. Another game on the floor that had "Elonka appeal" was "Pikmin 2" -- an original and addictive-looking game where you lead herds of little aliens around a garden to capture various items.

I was also interested in games that are being marketed to kids, and saw several companies trying to target the young girls market with some "horsey" games. A very simplistic Disney "Princess" game allows 4-year-olds to decorate a horse with choices of ribbons and colorful saddles and other accoutrements. There was also mention of other games such as "Barbie's Riding Adventure" and a "Capture the Wild Horses" game which sounded promising, but though they were announced as new, none of the booths that were promoting them actually had them on display. In fact, that was something I noticed over and over throughout E-3 this year, was newly-announced games that had press in the "Show Daily" paper, but weren't actually being shown in the booths. This ranged from the horse games, to the Sony "PlayStation Portable" device, to the Sony Online Entertainment booth, which was basically just a closed booth surrounded by black curtains!

Oh, one of my pet peeve rants: Though I can enjoy the run-jump-shoot games, I hate the kind where you have to spend energy staying on a very particular path, and if you take one wrong step you fall into a pit of lava and get the words "Game Over" on the screen. That is *such* bad game design, and I'm astonished that there are still high budget games being produced with those kind of flaws (and yes, I saw exactly that scenario in some of the E-3 demos this year).

Factoids about the Korean game market: They're claiming gaming revenues of USD 2.5 billion in 2002, with 130 Million of that being "exported" games. Korea has 2100 game companies, though many of them are under USD 1 Million in size. The industry, however, is growing at an annual rate of 50%. Buzz was that Lineage usage has dropped off by 50%, and that the Korean gamers are notoriously fickle. The Korean games aren't "sticky" and keeping longtime players -- instead, entire teams of players will switch from one game to another, as it catches their interest. The Korean game "Mu" claims to be the largest game in the world with over 350,000 simultaneous players, but according to one of the folks from Themis, that "largest" title has a very different connotation in Korea than in the American market. In the U.S., the "big" games will achieve a certain status and then maintain them for awhile, degrading naturally through attrition, or perhaps taking a hit when a competitor opens, but the communities can stay very stable over the longterm. In Korea though, the "biggest" game might change overnight (or even hourly) depending on where the Korean community's attention is focused. About half of the revenues are generated via the internet cafe's which charge at a time-based rate, so the analogy that I heard used for them was taxicabs, where the meter will be running but the destinations can change constantly. Oh, and one more factoid: According to the Korean Game Development & Promotion Institute (which profiles dozens of the different Korean companies), NCsoft is definitely one of the larger revenue game companies in Korea, but it's by no means the largest. Other big companies in the Korean gaming space are: DSi, Esofnet (FEW/Hicom), JCE, Oz Intermedia, SunnyYNK, Wizard Soft, Andamiro, Digital Sunil, Multisoft, NPlex, Scirex, Com2us, Opentown, and SoftMax.

Let's see, what else? The graphics for Square Enix's "Final Fantasy X-2" looked amazing. I was also pleased to see that the combat scenes appeared to be more real-time, rather than the annoying kind from earlier Final Fantasy games where you'd be walking across an empty field and then the screen would flash and swirl and you'd be pulled into a separate combat environment (note: this may have been in one of the other Square games than Final Fantasy, so I'll have to doublecheck that it was an actual FF game that I was watching to see that combat).

Also, since I'm a huge DDR fan (Dance Dance Revolution), I had to check out the Konami booth. They had a large space on the floor this year, but it was mostly just demoing different versions of DDR games and dance pads for all the different console systems. There wasn't anything like "Para Para Paradise", or their drum or guitar games, which I found surprising (and disappointing).

In terms of what the "big games" are going to be this year, the games that I heard the most people drooling over were "Halo 2" and "Starcraft: Ghost". The demo for the Halo game (after I waited in line a half hour to see it) was quite good. It was presented in a very entertaining way by one of the designers (talking back and forth to one of the characters on the screen), and the game itself looked solid. Good graphics, and a couple new features that had the audience oohing and ahing and cheering, such as the ability to fire two weapons at once, and another spot where one of the flying hovercraft/cycles approached, and then the lead character could jump on top of the hovercraft, punch out the driver and throw them overboard, and then take command of the cycle themselves. :) There was also a lot of attention of course on the "Enter the Matrix" computer game (which they've put $21 million into, and are hoping to sell 5 million units, with 4 million already "in channel"), whose release was timed to coincide with the release of the movie (ticket sales of the movie, as of this writing, are breaking records). The game is supposed to be like "a third Matrix movie" in terms of its addition to the storyline and plot development. They used the actual actors from the movie, in scenes directed by the movie's creators, the Wachowski brothers (who are hard-core gamers themselves), to add to the gameplay.

Overall impressions of this year's E-3: Loud sensory overload, as usual. Also, it seemed more crowded at the beginning of the show than the end, which was different from last year, but that may also be because it didn't include a weekend day (E-3 ran Tuesday through Friday this year). I was disappointed by the number of announced products that weren't actually on display, but pleased to see the high quality of most of the games that *were* on display. Many of my friends ask me, "Was E-3 fun?" but I have to say that E-3 is really more work than fun for me, simply because there's so much that I'm doing. But yes, parts of E-3 definitely *are* fun, and no matter what, E-3 is quite an experience!