The top 11 trends of E3, from bubble shields to evil helicopters

Every year, we get a glimpse of the video game industry’s future at E3 . The trade show drew more than 45,000 attendees to Los Angeles last week, to gawk at the show’s 35,000 displays.

With that much stimulation, my eyes and memory fail me sometimes, but after 16 or so years covering E3, my sensors wake up and trigger my capacity for pattern recognition.

Over four days, we got a chance to see the games that most people won’t encounter until a year or so from now, and I got a sense of the trends that will shape the coming year in video games.

1. The video game industry is protected by super plexiglass bubble shield. Just when it seems like something is going to kill the video game industry — like the great recession of 2008-2009 — something always saves it. Like Master Chief (pictured top) in the Halo series, the industry seems like it can make itself immune during E3 to all of the disruption that is happening around it.

The traditional console video game is threatened from all directions: Zynga’s Facebook games are eating at the audience. Apple’s iPhones and iPads are stealing customers. Free-to-play online games are killing subscription games. And Android smartphones are dispensing with the need to buy new handheld game players. And Apple tried to steal the show’s thunder by scheduling its Worldwide Developer Conference at the same time.

But this year there was a kind of “What, Me Worry?” attitude about all of that. The big video game publishers showed off their big budget games that were like summer blockbuster movies. And they were awesome enough to make us all believe, at least during the show itself, that nothing could eat away at the revenues of the big games.

The game publishers came up with one potential blockbuster after another: BioShock Infinite, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 and many others. With such games, it’s no wonder that the social and mobile game companies don’t come to the show. There’s no way they can compete against the black hole that sucks in all the attention of gamers when these blockbuster games debut. Call of Duty alone will likely generate a billion dollars in revenue.

This makes me think that the video game industry is one of those beings from our imagination that is both thriving and dying at the same time. One part of the industry has been devastated by free games. But the other part is vibrant with life. As long as the game industry keeps driving forward, it should be able to survive. This doesn’t mean that the disruptors have failed. They’re just creeping along unnoticed for now. One example: Bigpoint, Germany’s maker of free-to-play online games, has more than 190 million registered users. Those gamers probably aren’t playing as many $60 console games anymore. But the big giants of consoles haven’t been stung yet.

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