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E3, the Sequel: Video-Game ExpoThis week, the video-game industry will descend on Los Angeles, along with a motley cast of zombies, aliens and the like.
But wait -- that zombie looks awfully familiar. And hasn't that alien been here before?
The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, kicks off Monday night. But when it comes to the biggest games of the show, much of the suspense is already gone: the industry has come to rely more heavily than ever before on sequels. Even the show itself is something of a sequel, as many of the games featured this year have been previewed already.
"It's going to be a really exciting E3, but at the same time it's going to be really disappointing, because the biggest games, the biggest software titles, are going to be the same ones we saw last year," said Dan "Shoe" Hsu, editor of leading games magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly. Among the sequels starring in this year's show that also featured in the last E3 in some form are Halo 2 from Microsoft, Half-Life 2 from Valve Software and Gran Turismo 4 from Sony.
U.S. sales growth for the games industry has slowed from double-digit gains to single-digit increases. For the current year, estimates vary widely, with some analysts seeing growth of as little as 3 percent unless sales get a boost from console-hardware price cuts.
Source:
www.e3inside... (44)
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