E3 Alive and Kicking - But for how Long?

However, if there's anything the E3 operation highlighted, it was that much of Live's potential is still waiting to be fleshed out, and things need to step-up a gear to get there. Playstation 3 may be promising a lot with its online features and functionality, but regardless of whether it provides or not, MS would be wise to find its aces in the deck and start dealing them. Online gaming is obviously content driven, and while there's been a nice batch of demos and trailers being fed through, it desperately needs more high profile software to keep the momentum.

As nice as the content from E3 was, it was still a little too staggered to reach the maximum impact it perhaps could have had. True, the brilliance of the concept meant we were all ready to download anything and everything from Live, and the novelty of it was perfect in terms of firing shock tactics at a captive audience. But were it not for the Lost Planet taster - easily the show stealer when it came to Live's downloads- would there be quite as much enthusiastic bombast? Arguably not. Capcom's third-person action title was a stunning example of what can be done in allowing punters to play what's at E3, but there simply wasn't enough other publishers taking a bite of that cherry. From the dozens and dozens of playable titles on the show floor, Live provided a very very VERY small example.

No one is saying that every single game shown in L.A. should be available via Live. There's a large political minefield that would render that impossible for one. Further, developers are usually nervous at showing their wares in such a usually unfinished state, as much of the software at E3 has glitches and bugs that eagle-eyed demonstrators have to be on hand to deflect with verbal bullets that scream "this-code-is-still-a-little-early". Closed door presentations give leverage in regards to publication coverage, and also make sure the game controller never gets into the hands of anyone who's going to crash a particularly temperamental demo, with irregular or experimental play. Those, and many other such issues prevent a large widespread representation of E3's products bring downloaded for home use, not to mention any possible bandwidth concerns.

But what we got this year was barely a sample of what could have been, and now is only a small indication of what we expect next year. Trailers are something easily done by sites, which means demos are the main unique draw for Xbox Live - proven by the large dominance all three demos (Lost Planet, MotoGP '06 and Test Drive Unlimited) had in the download numbers for the period. In fact, they were only surpassed by the Halo 3 teaser, but even then that's because it was available via the main Xbox.com site to download as well. If Live is to grow off events such as E3, there needs to be more playable content from more publishers across a wider spread of genres. 2007 should provide an interesting step in seeing if the obvious is realised.