I went to the 2011 edition of the E3 trade show and I came away impressed by a lot of the games that I saw but, after a few days of thinking about the expo and about what's to come in terms of video games, I really think that this is a video game industry that is headed for a big crisis soon.
And it's mainly the fault of hardware and the need to sell more people more of it every year.
Both the
PlayStation Vita handheld from Sony and the Wii U home console from Nintendo seem like evolutionary dead ends, good concepts that not a lot of people will actually pay in order to use when they are launched.
Both of them have the hardware to deliver good-looking and complex gaming experiences and there's some real innovation behind the
Wii U controller and behind the mix of options in Vita.
But there's nothing here that gaming really needs, nothing that feels genuinely fresh, like the Wii felt in 2005, nothing to make a potential customer jump up from the couch, drive to a store and place a firm pre-order on something that might only arrive in 2012.
The fact that the
Nintendo 3DS, which initially impressed with its three-dimensional gaming possibilities, had a huge launch and then started to fade in all sales charts after one month is not an encouraging sign.
Another big disappointment is that Nintendo did not show any real video games that would work with the Wii U and focused on tech demos and on how the new console will “expand” the gaming space.
At least Sony was quick to appeal to long time fans by talking about how the Vita was ready to deliver their next Uncharted and their next Resistance experience.
A lot of things can change before both the Vita and the Wii U are launched, but at the moment is seems that the hardware business might have some trouble coming on in the next year.
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