Games Market Europe Round-up

Games Market Europe was touted as the event for all members of the videogame industry to get together to see what was happening over the coming months. Journos, developers, publishers and retailers all attended the London event, but from a videogame journalist’s point of view, the event was pretty disappointing.

Let’s start with the positive. Some big names were there, including Ubisoft, Codemasters, Midway, EA, Eidos/SCi and Vivendi Universal Games. On paper that was very exciting, giving the event the potential to be something the UK games industry could be proud of. In reality it wasn’t quite as great. Only a few of those who attended seemed to have made a real effort, so we’ll give you a run down of who did what.

Codemasters

These guys put on a good display, with playable versions of TOCA Race Driver 3, Heroes of the Pacific, LMA Manager 2005 and RF Online, with most shown on multiple formats. We were particularly impressed with TOCA 3 (our full preview can be read here, and LMA Manager, RF Online and Heroes were all looking pretty good. RF Online in particular looks like it will offer something a little different in the MMO genre, and we’re looking forward to spending more time with it later in the year.

Ubisoft

Ubisoft just announced that they are the second biggest publisher in Europe for the first half of 2005, but their stand at GME didn’t really reflect this. In comparison to the other stands at the event the demo stations for King Kong and Far Cry Instincts were good, but they could have shown far more. Rainbow Six: Lockdown was nowhere to be seen and Prince of Persia 3 and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter were both unplayable. King Kong’s attendance just about saved them, but the game itself was looking rather rough. Thankfully they’ve got plenty of time to polish things as the game isn’t due out until late in the year.

EA

The industry giant might as well have not turned up, its presence was so poor. Hidden away on the side of the Midway booth were four demo stations. These were housing FIFA 06, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and From Russia with Love. Of the four, FIFA was certainly the most impressive and looked to be a nice step up over last year’s game. The other three were less impressive. Harry Potter looked like a Harry Potter game (something I find hard to get excited about), NFS: Most Wanted on the PlayStation 2 had a horribly sluggish frame rate and twitchy controls, and From Russia with Love’s demo pod wasn’t working at all. We expected more from EA. Where was Burnout: Revenge or the rest of the EA Sport line-up? Hopefully they’ll take next year’s event more seriously.

Eidos/SCi

This was the most conventional of the stands on display. There were plenty of demo stations and a number of games that are due in the coming months. These included Conflict: Global Terror, Total Overdose and Commandos: Strike Force. They also had plenty of reps on hand to talk about the games. However, notably absent were Hitman: Blood Money and Tomb Raider: Legend – two of the company’s biggest upcoming titles. Still, this was one of the better stands at the event.

Vivendi Universal Games

Vivendi’s main stand was pretty small, with playable versions of Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Crash Tag Team Racing, plus trailers for 50 Cent: Bulletproof. These were overshadowed by the demo theatre for F.E.A.R.

Despite the fact we were only shown a short section that can be played in the recently released demo, seeing it running on an Athlon FX-55 with dual Geforce 6800s on a huge plasma screen was quite breathtaking. We’d like an Xbox 360 version please Vivendi.

Midway

The last of the ‘Big name’ publishers at the event, and perhaps the worst stand. Despite a rather large area, they had very little on display, with a couple of plasmas showing off a number of their upcoming games. Midway have a pretty strong looking line-up with the likes of Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks and LA Rush, so it was disappointing to see them with such a meagre presence at the show.

Next-Gen

With the Xbox 360’s launch on the horizon it would have been nice for the console to have a strong presence at the show, but it wasn’t to be. We had to make do with a ‘For display only’ demo pod and some rather beautiful trailers being shown on a rather huge plasma screen on the wall next to it. Ubisoft also had a trailer for Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter running at their stand, but on the whole the show didn’t have a very strong next-gen showing.

PC

PC games were also in rather short supply, with NCsoft and their MMOs having the largest presence at the event. Vivendi were hosting screenings of the F.E.A.R E3 demo, which looked great, but wasn’t anything we hadn’t seen before, and the previously mentioned RF Online was tucked away inside Codemasters’ stand.

The rest

There were plenty of smaller budget labels tucked away in the hall, along with some peripheral manufacturers, plus a large number of industry bods mingling near the bar. Digital Jesters were also there, showing off Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport and playing Crazy Frog music videos next door to EA’s corridor of shame, not helping my already poor impression of EA’s stand. Buena Vista Games also had a nice booth, displaying their upcoming ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ and ‘Chicken Little’ videogames. Their themed area was pretty nice, and showed the big boys a thing or two.

My overall impression was one of disappointment. It seems that only Codemasters, Vivendi and Ubisoft (at a push) put any real effort into their stands, with the others merely making up numbers rather than actually using the event at its fullest. It’s quite sad that reading about rumours of playable Xbox 360 games at the event the evening after attending was actually more exciting than the show itself. Here’s hoping that next year’s event is a little grander.