e3 posts

The Child's Play game-themed charity is expanding its reach once again in an unique way. Today it was announced that in association with the ESA Foundation, the charity will host its first annual golf tournament to raise funds for the many children's hospitals it supports.

The tournament will be held on June 5 at the Brookside Golf Course in Pasadena, California, just a couple of days before E3 2011 is slated to officially begin in nearby Los Angeles. More details and sign ups for the tournament are now available on the Penny Arcade web site. The entry fee will be $150 or $175 with club rental.

E3 2011 is being held on June 7-9 but this year the trade show's organizers at the Entertainment Software Association are apparently trying to limit the number of media badges issued to attend the Los Angeles-based event. Our sister site Joystiq received a note sent to an unnamed gaming web site from E3's media team that describes how E3 organizers are now using web site traffic to determine which web sites will receive media badges and how many media badges each site will receive.

According to the note E3 organizers stated that it is making such a move "due to the tremendous number of requests for media badges" for this year's show. It is using web site traffic tracking sites like Compete.com, xinureturns.com, Quantcast.com and Alexa as part of its efforts. Those sites must show that media web sites have at least 8,000 monthly unique visitors and be in operation for at least six months before at least one media badge will be approved. There have been some concerns that such a set up will favor larger media organizations who will be able to have a larger team at E3 compared to smaller sites.

Last month the E3 2011 web site allowed folks in the game industry to register to attend the annual PC-video game trade show in Los Angeles. Today the web site started to allow media to register for attending E3, to be held on June 7-9 at its usual home of the Los Angeles Convention Center. One interesting twist for media registration is that badges won't be mailed ahead of time. Instead a bar code will be emailed to approved media members that will be scanned at the convention center for the final badge.

The web site also has a preliminary list of exhibitors that are already signed up to attend the 2011 trade show. At first glance it looks like most of the major publishers and a lot of smaller companies will be attending this year. One notable exception is NCsoft who is once again missing from the list. The MMO game publisher has chosen not to attend E3 for the past three years.

Update: Gamasutra reports that the changes for the delivery of media badges for E3 were made in order to keep physical badges from being resold or even copied before the show.

The US PC-video game trade group the Entertainment Software Association has confirmed to Big Download that it has added two new companies as members. Both the graphics chip company Nvidia and the MMO game publisher Perfect World Entertainment are now listed as members on the ESA's web site. ESA PR rep Dan Hewitt confirmed to Big Download today that Nvidia and Perfect World came aboard officially as members in the latter half in 2010.

The ESA currently shows 36 member companies on its official web site. However two of the members listed, Eidos Interactive and Realtime Worlds, are no longer active companies. Eidos merged with Square Enix in 2009 and Realtime Worlds shut down operations in 2010 following the disastrous launch and later shut down of its FPSMMO game APB.

The ESA, which owns the annual E3 trade show event as well as the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, lost a number of high profile members in 2008 including Activision, LucasArts and id Software. Hewitt told Big Download today that the ESA has a constant dialog with the industry about bringing in new members as well as perhaps bringing back older ones.

With 2011 still pretty fresh in everyone's mind, it's time to see into Big Download's crystal ball for what's going to happen in the PC game industry in 2011. Looking back at our predictions for what we thought would happen in 2010, we got about 50 percent of our predictions correct. Not bad but not all that great either.

However that track record isn't going to stop us from making our predictions for what might happen in the next 12 months. As we see it, the PC game industry is looking pretty darn good, concerning all of its competition (console games, iPhone and iPad gaming, social network games, etc) and the fact that the overall economy, while better than it was at the beginning of 2010, still isn't the greatest. But will there be any unexpected left field surprises? Read on for what we think might happen:

We are in the last few days of 2010 but its already time to start thinking ahead to June 2011. We are less than six months away from the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo. It's not the biggest game event in terms of attendance anymore (not even here in the US; the two PAX events have eclipsed E3's numbers). However it's still the the place where most of the major game announcements of the year are made.

The official E3 web site is now taking registrations for people who want to attend the show at the Los Angeles Convention Center on June 7-9 (media and exhibitor registration have yet to go live). If you work directly in the game industry in some capacity you can register before April 25 and check out the exhibit floor for free. People not in the industry can still attend but they will have to fork over a $400 fee.

The US-based game trade group the Entertainment Software Association is perhaps best known as the owner and operator of the annual E3 trade show. However, the organization has a number of different interests and activities. Today the ESA offered up its 2009 annual report to the public.

The PDF-based document goes into detail on all of the ESA's activities such as running the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, the US game ratings system. The annual report also details the ESA's activities in federal and state governments, its dealings with fighting game piracy and protecting intellectual property rights, its charitable ESA Foundation and more. Currently the ESA has 35 game developers and publishers as members.

Big Download has now come to the end of its coverage of E3 for its 2010 installment. We went to cover and for the first time to film tons of activities at or near the Los Angeles Convention Center. We saw some good game demos, saw some that, well, didn't wow us and saw some really odd stuff along the way.

While other web sites and media outlets like to give out awards to games at the show, our philosophy is that giving awards like "Best RPG" to unfinished products is a little silly, especially since very often the final game doesn't turn out as well as its E3 demo. So as we did last year, we are giving awards in categories that are a little different and also showcase what it's actually like to attend the event for those of you who can't go. As always we hope you like it.

The 2010 edition of E3 has been over for a week now but we are still recovering from checking out all of the titles that we saw at the Los Angeles Convention Center. There were also lots of games that were there we didn't get to see unfortunately. But most importantly of all were the games we know are being made but still didn't make it to the show.

E3 is unquestionably the single biggest event in the game industry but for a variety of reasons some highly anticipated PC titles were not even shown in trailer form at the event. So which games went missing? We just happened to have created a handy list of titles that we think could have made an appearance of some type at the show.

It's all over. The Los Angeles Convention Center is relatively quiet today. The exhibits are being boxed up and transported out. The loud speakers and massive TV sets are shut down. Most importantly there's not a booth babe in site. Yep, E3 2010 is now over with.

The Entertainment Software Association, the trade group that owns E3, stated in a press release that about 45,600 people and about 300 exhibitors attended the 2010 edition this week. That' about 4,000 more than 2009's E3 event. Next year, E3 2011 will once again invade the LA Convention Center on June 7-9.

[Via email press release]