(no subject)
For all intensive purposes, E3 (The Electronic Entertainment Expo) has been canceled. It isn't per se, but when the attendance drops from over 60,000 people a year to a meager few hundred, it is probably some kind of foreshadowing event to announce the demise of the convention altogether.
Practically, it makes sense. Considering the event and its magnitude, and its rate of growth (GDC is getting even bigger every year), it was my inital thought that it was some hardball attempt to obtain concessions of some kind, but the event probaby stopped making sense on a spreadsheet several years ago. I mean, the hotel and tourism industry in Los Angeles pulls an estimated 50 million dollars from the event alone, even though it only lasts three days.
Here's what Tycho from Penny Arcade! has to say about it:
"Acting as their own outlets, publishers get much more reliable data about the efficacy of their marketing payload. Trying to project their unsullied, carefully manicured marketing message at E3 is essentially like putting a choice morsel in the bottom of a burlap sack, and then filling the bag with cats. You swing the bag around and around, at which point dizzy felines emerge. Did it work? Hard to say. Oh! Also, the sack costs forty million dollars."
I mean, it's a lot of fun to watch, but then, I've never had to pay for EA's ten million dollar HD surround theater and then tried with furrowed brow to determine the return on that investment.
"There must have been a time before there was an E3, but that's not really a part of my experience. Hearing that it's cancelled, or at any rate will be 'altered in format and scale' (read: cancelled) is like hearing that Australia has been cancelled, or that the weak gravitational force of the earth is being temporarily suspended. It's not an event anymore, I don't even remember how many I've been to. It's like something that cracks through the asphalt and then grows upward. I make it a point to avoid Los Angeles the rest of the year, so it's always been my presumption that the entire Staples Center recedes below the Earth's mantle, there to sleep until the warm pavement buckles again in early May."
In other news, the Halo 2 matchmaking playlists are soon to undergo a metaphorical facelift, at which point the entire universe will fall into place and there will be peace. Except, of course, on Xbox Live.
The intention of said overhaul is to remove certain gametypes (i.e., Rumble Hardcore) and revamp others (i.e., Team SWAT & Double Team). Currently, as shown by ratings, Team SWAT is holding a steady second place under Team Slayer. There are arguments on both sides whether it should remain unranked or not. Personally, I don't care. It is nothing except a game, I am not cheating the system; therefore I can play whether it is ranked or not. Guests are invited at their leisure to remove the beating organ that gives them life, sautee it with mushrooms and onions, and enjoy eating it with a side of hollandaise.
(MS) DG out.
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