E3: an annual festival of video games

The Elec­tronic En­ter­tain­ment Expo is the mo­ment every year for the main play­ers in the video game in­dus­try to show off their mus­cles. Known as E3, the fair is an an­nual event where the in­dus­try's big an­nounce­ments are made. This year's edi­tion in Los An­ge­les was no ex­cep­tion, even if some of the an­nounce­ments were fo­cused more on soft­ware. Yet, this was to be ex­pected, as the cur­rent games con­soles are rel­a­tively new and now is the time to start re­leas­ing games for them and thereby stim­u­late sales.

Sony is clear about keep­ing a strong cat­a­logue for its PlaySta­tion 4 (PS4) as the new con­sole with the best sales so far . Ac­tion, clas­sics, ad­ven­tures, the Japan­ese mul­ti­me­dia giant kept even the most hard­core gamers happy with a stream of an­nounce­ments of new games that, for the most part, will not reach stores until next year. This is the case of a game that has gen­er­ated much ex­pec­ta­tion, The Last Guardian. This pro­ject has been in de­vel­op­ment for many years, to the point that some gamers had given up on ever play­ing it. Some­thing sim­i­lar hap­pened with Shen­mue 3, an open-world role-play­ing game. The third in­stal­ment will bring the saga to a close after a 14-year wait. The game, funded by a kick­starter crowd­fund­ing pro­ject, will be ex­clu­sive to PS4 and PC. Sony also an­nounced the re­lease of a new ver­sion of the much-loved Final Fan­tasy 7 for PS4.

Other high­lights were the an­nounce­ment of a new chap­ter in the Un­charted se­ries, this time with pi­rates, while No Man's Sky, a game in which the player ex­plores a seem­ingly in­fi­nite uni­verse of plan­ets and Dreams, the lat­est ex­per­i­ment from the cre­ators of the Lit­tle Big Planet were other nov­el­ties an­nounced by Sony. Fi­nally, Hori­zon is a new ac­tion game that por­trays a fu­ture in which cities have died and na­ture has es­tab­lished dom­i­nance, in which a woman has to face ro­botic di­nosaurs.

Apart from plat­form ex­clu­sives, the large firms are keen to pro­mote ad­di­tional con­tent for third party best­sellers. Sony has World of Final Fan­tasy and Street Fighter V and also un­der­writes ad­di­tional con­tent for As­sas­sin's Creed Syn­di­cate, the Des­tiny ex­pan­sion, The Taken King, and Call of Duty: Black Ops III, the lat­est in­stal­ment from the video game fran­chise that has sold more copies than any other in gam­ing his­tory.

How­ever, it seems that in this E3 games are still more im­por­tant than vir­tual re­al­ity (VR), which was ad­ver­tised as some­thing to look out for. Sony had al­ready an­nounced its Mor­pheus VR pro­ject, al­though de­tails are scant. The Ocu­lus Rift VR sys­tem was also pre­sent at E3, but be­yond con­firm­ing its launch in 2016 there was lit­tle to go on. The CEO of Sony Com­puter En­ter­tain­ment, An­drew House, as­sured at­ten­dees that the de­vel­op­ers of Pro­ject Mor­pheus were work­ing with truly im­mer­sive ex­pe­ri­ences but still had a way to go. From the ru­mours sur­round­ing the VR pro­jects, it seems de­vel­op­ers are pur­su­ing a so­cial func­tion for their sys­tems, con­nect­ing users rather than iso­lat­ing them.