A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The opulence was at once awe-inspiring and revolting. In addition to the incredible scale of the show itself, every night held some amazing party or gathering from the principal game publishers and hardware manufacturers in the market today. I spoke with several developers shopping their products around without success. Unfortunately, the game market right now is about big money.
Big money means big return on investment.
Big ROI means that risk is bad, and innovation means risk. In other words, the folks with the best products at this year's show are going to have the toughest row to hoe in getting venture capital and marketing muscle to push their wares. Sega took the wraps off its new game system, the Dreamcast. After the Saturn debacle, the company is trying very carefully to make sure that developer support is wide open on this machine. Sega indicates that the Dreamcast will be built around a Hitachi SH4 RISC chip retooled with a better FPU .