Microsoft had some great announcements, but most of them leaked out. The highlight of the day was that Microsoft announced that it will launch Halo 4 in 2012 and will launch a remake of the classic Halo Combat Evolved game from 2001 later this year. The Halo 4 game picks up where Halo 3 left off and includes Master Chief and Cortana. It will be part of a new trilogy. Microsoft also leaked a Disney Adventures Kinect game and Star Wars Kinect the night before. With so many leaks, it was hard to say we learned anything new at the Microsoft event.

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And while Apple will do its best to steal the thunder of E3 by having its own Worldwide Developer Conferencein the same week, it no longer seems like the iPhone and the iPad are pummeling the traditional game industry. Apple won’t kill the consoles, or so it seems. In fact, it almost seems that, after years of struggle for control of the industry, the various factions of the game industry are becoming more and more satisfied with the concept of variety. Consumers are embracing games in any kind of form. About 67 percent of American households play games, and the average gamer is 34 years old. Forty percent of gamers are women.

Read the full article at VentureBeat!

David Geary, who lead the study, had the following to say:

“In a serious out-group competition you can kill all your rivals and you’re better for it,”
“You can’t alienate your in-group partners, because you need them,”

Meaning that it makes sense to eliminate a group of strangers to establish dominance, allowing the testosterone to surge, but when the opponent is a relative or friend the level stays pretty much the same. In the latter case it is interesting for the gamer to establish dominance, but not to the full extent because he will need these people in his social environment.

We can directly conclude that you should play with friends instead of against them.

From the first MUD Shadow of Yserbius to the 12 million subscriptions World of Warcraft has today, the MMO market on the PC represents almost the entire growth of the PC as a gaming platform. The MMO’s competed with everything available on PC’s at that time and Alexander tells us it is going to do exactly the same for the console.

There are a few problems with their plans; one of them being the difficulty of developing on the PS3, opposed to developing for the Xbox360, so Alexander says developers should develop for the PS3 and then port  to the Xbox360, which is suppossed to be a lot easier! He publishes a great list of problems on his slides, which you’ll find in the gallery below. But the other would be the following: For the PC, you would only pay a monthly fee to play the game, for the Xbox you would pay a fee for Xbox Live and then also for the game. Casual player will say it’s too expensive, while hardcore players will have a PC game for sure.

I’m convinced consoles will remain a big part of gaming, but the MMO market will probably stay best, played at the PC with a full keyboard and all its options.

Aside from hinting on a day that players’ Facebook profiles will be integrated in Guitar Hero, he also expected many of his now console based games to be playable independent of a console!

“I think what the untethered Guitar Hero does is equal the playing field a little more and give you some leverage with first parties when it comes to downloadable content and the business model,”

So aside from integrating all his PC games into one platform (Battle.net 2.0) he will also be able to bring games to your living room regardless of your ownership of one of the consoles.  The argument he makes for this is that he hasn’t seen any plans of any new console, so it must be more than 2 years away for new consoles to be launched, allowing him to explore all the options the current hardware environment has to give.

“Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch,” Jobs told the New York Times. “Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine.

“We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to USD 199. We don’t need to add new stuff. We need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.”

There you have it, huge sales numbers; iPhone sold 30 million units, Touch sold 20 million; both in the past 2 years, combined with its enormous amount of games looks to be Apple’s ticket in the big league of gaming. The new technology; iPhone 3GS and new iPod Touch, allows for even more impressive graphics and gameplay allowing designers to push the envelope even furthur.

Next stage? More processing power, augmented reality, and fully integrated social networking features. I believe the future has no monthly play in terms of call time in it, we just lease the phone of our choice and pay a flat fee for data.

In an earlier post I talked about the ESWC bankruptcy; three in a row and there is just one team that has managed to do just this. Through its leadership in many fields, most notable Counter-Strike, it was able to launch the SK Insider service, based on the gamers.nu model of having aspiring pro gamers pay for the privilege of  learning more about the game and their idols. 15% of the teams revenue is said to be derived from this income stream. This may not seem much but a team fielding 33 players with serious salaries, not all of them full-time but still, their overhead must be pretty big, not even mentioning the 10 full-time employees.

I think they are showing the way for gaming teams to go forward. Think about the american franchised based sports, NBA/NFL/NASCAR, and you know what I mean. Most of their income is received through sponsorships, but a solid amount of income is generated by fan-based services and merchandise.  They are one of the founders of the G7, not one of the best efforts around, but still a player-oriented organization working towards a standard e-sports practice in tournaments and competitions globally.

One of the owners has just done an interview with HLTV.org. Check it out over here. Andreas “bds” Thorstensson

More information can be found on their website: www.sk-gaming.com