gforce revolution

All this talk about an event like E3. Don't expect it it to be anything like the old E3. I can't see publishers spending big bucks for a consumer show. I'm willing to predict it's winds up being nothing more then a big gaming flea market with publishers pushing all their old titles. What's even more surprising is that IDG, the parent company, may not even use the GamePro name. The final name has not been decided but perhaps even IDG concedes that GamePro has a brand image. Overall I have very low expectations for this event.

AOL's acquistion should shake up the gaming information publishing industry. If any of you have access to Media Metrix reports you will know that a lot of money is made according to audience reach. A lot of effort goes into getting top ranking. Right now the top two gaming sites are IGN and Gamespot respectively. They have had those spots locked in for some time. With AOL in the mix it may shake things up because AOL brings a large audience to the category and that in turn means more ad dollars going their way.
Keep an eye on what the Magazine Publisher sites do, (IDG, Future and Ziff-Davis) because this AOL deal has the potential of taking away business from these guys. IDG has had the highest ranking of the three thanks mainly to starwars.com (a non-gaming site they claim in Media Metrix as part of their gaming audience). Future has had a high ranking thanks to cheatplanet being rolled up into gamesradar.com (a terribly designed site), and Ziff-Davis gets a boost in traffic from Filefront a downloading site, formerly a UGO affilate that Ziff purchased. None of them are serioius online players. Thay all risk losing market share now. If they lose enough online advertising dollars because AOL, IGN and Gamespot take the lion's share of the advertising revenue, maybe these magazine publisher sites will fold up and go away (let's hope so) or get gobbled up themselves by a larger online entity. Bottom line, AOL's move into the gaming space by acquiring GameDaily is a smart business move.

Nice story GameDaily (and I liked the pictures too). Interesting that no one has mentioned the part of the story where Buffa asks the porn starletts about what kind of porn video game they would like to see made. Probably too hot a subject to bring up here. Now that I know that the PSP is the system of choice in that industry, it gives a whole new meaning to "handheld" gaming. I guess it also means that PSP really stands for Porn Star Player.