E3 2007 Winners and Losers
With any E3, even the dismal boring, business one that was this year’s event, the talk as soon as the final press conference ends is always who won. Really, there is no metric to measure which big console-making publisher brought down the house.
This year, without the crowds of excited fan boys, all the press conferences seemed to be a slightly uneventful presentation. The slight woohoos and yeahs from the crowd were weakly scattered between awkward long pauses by the speakers. Game journalists just don’t hoot and hollar as much as the fans did last year, and, of course, there are less people around.
Kotaku believes the winner was Nintendo. They definitely put on a good show this year and will no doubt catch a lot of attention from the casual gamers and consumer media outlets for the Wii Fit reveal, but the hardcore gamers of E3 found little be excited about in the new announcements. The only item of information I found worth noting was the announced release date of Smash Bros. Brawl.
Microsoft’s conference was just focused on announcing games coming out this year. As many game journalists commented, this marketing move was intended to make PS3 and Nintendo look behind by comparison since the Xbox 360 is a year ahead as far as software development and happy to brag about it. This focus took away from the norm of E3 though since no surprises–besides a clip of the next Resident Evil–really jumped out at anyone. Everyone already knew about the titles coming out of good old M$.
Sony had a lot of ground to cover and came in with a price drop looming over their heads. After presenting their press conference in a very casual and unimpressive forum, they also didn’t have many more games and surprises to throw at us this year.
So the final verdict? I didn’t see a clear winner out of any of it. While Nintendo may get the most press from their announcement, I think Sony made the most progress in changing their image and generating an increase in excitement. They had a lot of room for improvement since there was almost no excitement going in Sony’s direction this year after all the trouble they have had with the PS3. I still don’t even like Sony, but I hate to say that I think they did the best job in making the most of E3.
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