There was a buzz — even a crackle — in the air as journalists arrived for the pre-show press conference at this year’s Gaming Alliance Middle East Show.
This year’s expo, at the World Trade Centre, offered gamers — and many game journalists — their first chance to try out next generation games on next generation consoles.
Robert Fisser, Sony’s PlayStation Division General Manager for the MENA region, had the news everyone was waiting for: the PlayStation 4’s UAE release date and price (December 13, Dh1,699).
“With PlayStation 4 we had a number of goals in mind and with performance being the most critical we set ourself a target to create something that’s ten times more powerful than any previous console. The result is a console that makes stunning graphics and rich interactive worlds for you to play in. The PlayStation 4 is gamer focussed, developer inspired. It’s immediate.”
His Microsoft counterpart Aman Sangar, Head of Interactive Entertainment for Xbox Gulf, had no firm date for the Xbox One launch, other than sometime in 2014, but that didn’t dampen his enthusiastic reveal of the console, nor his equally enthusiastic announcement of a new slimline Xbox 360 with a series of special bundles and his promotion of the virtues of Xbox Live.
“All in all, this is an incredibly exciting time for all of us,” Sangar said. “We are at the cusp of a hardware launch with an existing console ecosystem growing extremely strong.
“The industry is evolving and I’m excited that we as gamers are getting into a new era of gaming which a few years back was the realm of science fiction.”
Where Sony are promoting the raw power of the PS4’s hardware, Sangar, in an interview after the conference, was keen to point out that power isn’t all about hardware, but about how you use it: an efficient operating system can make a big difference. He obviously feels the new Xbox will be a very clever box.
Paul Johnson, Senior Product Manager at regional game distributors Pluto Games, said: “The video game industry is going from strength to strength as more and more people in the world and the region engage in gaming in one or more of its many expressions, either console, PC, browser-based or mobile — I could carry on.
“With only three months until the end of 2013 and the imminent next-gen console launches we are looking forward to 2014 with great excitement and optimism. We are very confident that the new systems from PlayStation and from Xbox will innovate and expand the video game and interactive entertainment to new levels and thrill the huge audiences they are targeting with fantastic new and ground-breaking games.”
Mike Wombwell, CEO and founder of distributors Red Entertainment, said: “There’s still a lot of life left in the current gen with about three million consoles in the region. It’s pretty exciting for us. We know there’s going to be a longer tail for that business and still pretty good titles going to be released for those formats, so we’re really happy about that.
“We expect during transition, when you go from current gen to the next gen, there’s always a slight point hit; we’re sort of expecting that a little bit towards the end of next year. But the future looks good and we’re really excited about that.”
