Op-Ed

Thoughts from the Press Briefing

Greetings from the Themis (our parent company) booth in the Staples Convention Center at E3 2006. The floor has only been open for an hour, but the noise is already ramping up and there have already been many lines in which to wait.

One of those lines was for the E3 press briefing and breakfast (still looking for this "breakfast"), with speech delivered by Doug Lowenstein. From the spillover room, The Escapist team and I listened as the ESA President gave a State of the Industry of sorts, bringing in data from a soon-to-be-published white paper commissioned by the ESA. All in all, an interesting speech.

One of the things that struck me most, were his statements regarding the cable industry and how they are thanking gaming for driving the demand and technology of highspeed internet forward. Games, apparently, are providing a reason, both logistical and financial, to expand current infrastructure. I hear this and then I contrast it to the current talks going on, from these same people who are praising and thanking games, to charge more for certain types of data packets. Specifically, the data packets in question would be for high traffic sites and companies, ie. games. Charging more to the companies would likely, in turn, raise consumer prices, which would then lower the demand.

Seems a bit like shooting themselves in the foot.