Where's the Plug? Gaming Is Still the Porn of CES

Electronic Gaming Business, Jan 14, 2004

One of the good things about a trade show of 110,000 plus tech dweebs is that even an eight-foot tall, horned, puss-oozing demon with halitosis issues can go into stealth mode and look like just another hygiene-challenged gadget geek. In fact, like video gaming itself, the Boss was easily overlooked by much of the Consumer Electronic show in Vegas last week.

While hi-def sports, nature shows, and Finding Nemo were running on just about every flat screen you could see on the endless show floors, there was barely a glimmer of how millions of home theater owners actually use their fancy rigs -- to play games. To be sure, the Consumer Electronics Show is a deviceoriented convention, and so we don't expect the major game publishers to buy up costly kiosks to show their wares. What was surprising, however, is how little the gaming medium seems to have been integrated into the CE industry's thinking about how and why people buy into home theaters. ESPN was there, for instance, touting its content as an HDTV system seller. There were demos everywhere of how multi-use devices could swap and archive homemade digital images across PC, TV, cell phone, and PDA. But was anyone leveraging the multimedia sense-fest of Halo in 5.1 audio or the gorgeous photo-realistic battle scene from EA's Return of the King on a 63-inch DLP TV? Nope. While some estimates we heard suggest that nearly half of all home theater rigs have game consoles attached to them, you couldn't tell that on this show floor.

Ironically, the vendors who did incorporate gaming into their vision of home electronics consistently attracted a crowd. Intel wasn't shy about featuring a regular schedule of driving game competitions at its large booth. All of those electronics sales types, complete with bad hair styles, Rayon suits, and shopping bags of swag, were transfixed as they latched onto a NASCAR racer for those few minutes.

Intel was also wiser than any of the laptop manufacturers by using games to show off its mobile chipsets. By the way, laptop gaming is being ignored by our industry, even though the majority of PCs sold now are mobile. Publishers should be following Intel's lead and market laptop-friendly gaming packages and partner with these hardware vendors.

Some companies often seem to eschew gaming, almost seeing it as an embarrassment rather than a core marketing strength. Microsoft didn't seem to know what to do with the Xbox at the show. In his endless keynote address/sales pitch, Bill Gates very briefly showed the Media Center Extension module for the Xbox, which will let the console connect with a household Media Center PC and feed its content onto the home theater. Nevertheless, the module itself was nowhere to be seen at the MS booth, with no pricing or release date.

Creative Labs, bless them, knew better what to do with an Xbox than Microsoft, and both publishers and hardware companies should learn from their example. While the Sound Blaster company has been among the most successful instances of a games-related firm moving into the CE category with its MP3 players, they have not left gaming behind. Several CL booths were showing off their speaker designs in surround sound kiosks running Crimson Skies on an Xbox into a DTS decoder and seven-speaker rig. And it blew some moss off of the Boss's horns, or at least what moss was left after the previous night's lap dance.

Plugging In?

Theoretically, game experiences should sell home theater hardware like nobody's business, and yet both CE and game industries still seem unable to see exactly where the game console plugs into this system. A game like Crimson Skies or Halo uses directional sound more precisely and effectively than most DVDs. How better to demonstrate the pixel-sharp clarity and coloration of an LCD or plasma large screen TV than to let it immerse a player in Return of the King or Prince of Persia? Not only that, but every CE fan knows that newer DLP and Plasma TVs overcome one of the great phobias home theater owners suffered about gaming on CRT-based projection TVs, burn in from static images. Gaming should be a central selling point for these new technologies.

The game industry itself may be to blame for not recognizing and leveraging itself as a home theater experience. The hardware is there. One company that recognizes this is George Lucas's THX Ltd.. The company announced at CES that it was introducing a "Game Mode" to its specs for the THX Ultra2 certification on home theater receiver/ amplifiers. The spec would ensure that game soundtracks are played through a four-speaker home theater with correct voice and sound effect positioning and ambient effects. THX knows that gaming is one of the payoffs of home theaters, and one of the sector's strongest selling points. "More than 50% of home theater owners integrate video game consoles into their home entertainment systems," says Mark Tuffy, director of advanced technology, THX. Why is this such a dirty little secret for the rest of the CE industry?