The biggest event in the video game industry each year happens in Los Angeles, CA and goes by the tag Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3), taking place sometime in June. Each year the big three console manufactures (as well as every publisher across the planet) bring the big guns to the conference floor and attempt to garner attention from media outlets everywhere. Depending on what they show and how their presser events go the console can either have momentum going into the Holiday shopping season or crash-and-burn with boring presentations and lackluster software. Even though it's a few months off we wanted to go ahead and list out the top 10 things that Microsoft must do to dominate E3 2010, for the Xbox 360 console.
10. Snatch Another Previous Exclusive: It was a huge blow to many of the Sony fanboys when Microsoft finally nabbed the proverbial golden goose that is Final Fantasy XIII and got it on the Xbox 360. Sure, it had a few compression issues and had to be expanded out to several discs, but who cares? The Final Fantasy franchise had finally moved to a Microsoft console and while many forget that Nintendo still has a fair share of the franchise as well, Playstation fanboys took it particularly hard. So, what better way for Microsoft to kick off their E3 extravaganza than by announcing that they’ve somehow managed to snag one of Nintendo’s flagship titles? After all, what better way to show their dominance to the masses of the gaming community than by proving that they can get any content for their console owners anytime – provided they write a large enough check.
9. Live meets MMO: World of Warcraft is one of the biggest, flagship Massively Multiplayer Online titles in the known universe. Toss the popularity of titles like Star Trek Online and City of Heroes/Villains among other games and it is without a doubt notable that there’s money to be made by doing it. Provided a large enough fan base can be garnered and the game is actually fun to play. Given a degree of quality and putting some actual thought forward, it could feasibly be possible for Microsoft to give Xbox Live users an MMO that could compete with World of Warcraft. But it better be awesome.
8. Gaming One Episode at a Time: Episodic gaming is probably one of the best ways for developers to continue roll out new bits of content to users at a regular pace, unless it’s Valve. When the theoretical practice of releasing a game episodically as opposed to waiting for a full-fledged product to be completed works, it can pay off in dividends. The best example previously being Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2 had since been superseded by Fable 2 being able to be downloaded in bits and pieces from Xbox Live. While this is breaking up a completed project, I’d be interested to see Microsoft expand this type of distribution. It would be excellent if I could get into a game and pay level by level until I had either paid for it in it’s entirety or lost interest half-way through and moved on to something else. That and saving money always beats buying something half-heartedly.
This feature top 10 list continues on the next page, please click below to reveal our next few choices for what Microsoft needs to do to win E3 2010.
