It appears there's something rotten in the state of games. Journalists returning from last week's E3 extravaganza in Los Angeles have been discussing it, tweeting about it, blogging about it – but you wouldn't realise it from the largely ecstatic coverage of the online gaming press.
For many, this year's event has come to symbolise a growing malaise in the mainstream industry. It isn't about a lack of originality or business guile; it's not a fear about what "games as a service" actually means. It is all of them combined. And more.
A central complaint has been the lack of genuine breaking news at the event. We already knew almost everything about Sony's PS Vita and Nintendo's Wii U before E3, we just needed the names and a few launch titles. As for triple-A game announcements, well, there was Halo 4, and … not much else.
Returning from the show, Rory Buckeridge, associate editor of Nuts, tweeted: "It's going to be increasingly difficult for mainstream chaps like me if we go out and return with no news. Worrisome."
On Tuesday, he told me: "The show seems to be segueing from a news-based expo to somewhere where the media is drip-fed slightly more information about already-announced games, something that can be easily done, off spec, in our respective countries by the local PR departments.
"All this is fine, of course, for the specialist press, who think that a box art announcement is a top-line story, but we have to justify our valuable time to our increasingly time-poor editors, and it seems the sheer volume of specialist press coverage is swinging the pendulum away from mainstream media, whose audience it could well be argued is more key in creating blockbuster franchises."
Indeed, building excitement in mainstream publications such as Nuts, Shortlist, the Sun and a dozen US and online equivalents is key to driving pre-orders of those big Christmas releases – and that is what E3 is about now. The show's days as a vertical slice of the whole industry are long gone; it is there to support Q4 retail sales, and in doing so it steadfastly ignores the mobile, social and casual sectors which represent by far the largest areas of growth and innovation.
And if E3 can't excite beyond the specialist press, it is not working as an event. As Patrick Garratt of industry news site VG247 put it in his indictment of the show:
What we saw at E3 this year was a mid-cycle dead-zone. With digital sales now accounting for more than 40% of all games revenue and set to go past the halfway mark this year, where was the acknowledgment? Where was the day-date download release, the cross-platform integration? Where was the excitement of the next frontier?
If E3 was built on a bedrock of selling discs to stores for Christmas, how is it maintaining relevance in a world where we're about to see the majority of sales go to digital distribution and the year has become a homogenised release schedule?
But then the whole concept of the digital gaming has turned into something of a bête noire. In his recent and rather apocalyptic critique of the games industry, Six Ominous Trends In Video Games, David Wong wrote this about the transition from the traditional 'packaged goods' business to "games as a service":
The thing is, publishers ultimately want to get to the point where you're connected to their servers at every moment. This way they can continually check to make sure you have a non-pirated copy of the game and can then sell you downloadable extras and monthly subscriptions to play multiplayer. They also want you to buy all of your games via download so that you won't trade a physical copy in to GameStop (who will resell it and not give a penny to the publisher).
After that, they will move to a model like OnLive, where you never get a copy of the game at all – you simply play it off their machine, streamed over your internet connection. For this, you pay a monthly fee, hopefully for the rest of your life. All of this requires a constant connection. Which requires constant security. Which requires constant bullshit. Ask any PC gamer, they're already there.
His simplistic doom-mongering has (rightly) drawn criticism, but over the past fortnight we've seen Call of Duty: Elite, Battlelog and the EA Sports Football Club. Currently, these are sideline social networking services aimed at encouraging players online. But how do we know they're not just Trojans for constantly connected subscription businesses?
Wong writes about how Starcraft 2 players find their access to the single-player campaign compromised if they don't log on to Battlenet; we've already seen with EA's Online Pass how consoles can similarly restrict activity.
We like the idea of seamless gameplay integration between single- and multiplayer; Autolog is fun. But do we want to be continually connected to the unreliable servers and back-end infrastructures of the major game publishers?
Quite apart from the effect this could have on game content (a Farmville-like distopia of endless grinding), do we trust them? Hacker groups like Lulzsec are currently harvesting customer details from companies like Nintendo, Epic and Bethesda for fun. Who's next? When we're constantly connected, will we just be opening our bank accounts to every smart amoral kid with a basic knowledge of internet security systems?
Even if we're not, might we be entering an era in which even single-player campaigns are plagued by disrupted connections, endless buffering and game saves that evaporate into the cloud?
Others have balked at the lack of originality on show at E3. Of course, we all know that the mainstream games industry thrives on the safety of the brand-based business model – just as Hollywood does. Sequels and tie-ins are easier to market, have a built in fanbase and don't require months (sometimes years) of technology development, focus testing and awareness building.
But E3 was just an endless production line of familiar names with many of the key series' in double figures. Let's not kid ourselves, this has always been the case for hardware launches: Nintendo continually re-packages its Mario titles for every generation, while in the nineties, every new machine had to boast a range of arcade conversions.
But for third-party publishers facing declining retail sales and an uncertain digital future, many journalists have been asking, "well, where is the fresh 'IP' to see us through?" One thing is certain – everyone is complicit. The game sites and the gamers are writing about and buying sequels.
E3 can't help here – unless the nature of the event changes. As Garratt argues, "there's an opportunity to throw off the shackles of the 'old' E3, move it to a more suitable location – like Las Vegas – and embrace the gamescom and TGS format of a business event coupled with a consumer show. The North American games market is the biggest in the world: it needs to be excited. Video gaming is becoming less about platforms and all about content."
I'm a little ambivalent. I got out of E3 what I expected and nothing more. I'm more worried about where the industry itself is heading.
The apathy shown by some of the big players toward the exhibition hints at its demise, but that will be a death knell not just for a ludicrously noisy show, but for a whole way of thinking about games – as epic, landmark events. Some see the dripfeed of marketing information naturally transmogrifying into the dripfeed of content.
Games as services? I don't want to be trapped inside a virtual Skinner Box, on a treadmill of subscriptions. I want Red Dead Redemption and Heavy Rain. Everyone says those experiences won't go away, but somebody probably once said that about silent films and drive-in movie theatres. Was E3 2011 the Last Picture Show of the traditional games industry?
