Who will win E3 and why?

[txrattlesnake]

Last year, Sony showed off a lot of new ips and those were the big games that they had planned for the latter half of last year. However, even though most of those games turned out to be the most highly acclaimed games of last year in their respective genres, many of them weren't the big name games that would guarantee sure fire success.

Resistance 2 did have trouble going up against both the more popular Gears 2 and increasing hype for Killzone 2 which cut into its ability to really be a big seller. Problems that Uncharted doesn't have. The first one with sales close to 3 million established itself as a popular new series. And it doesn't have any rivals in its own genre. The only ones I could think of would be Assassin's Creed, a new Tomb Raider game, or Assassin's Creed 2, but I don't think it would have the same sales conflicts with those games that Resistance did with Gears, Halo, and Killzone. Uncharted 2 will likely either equal or surpass the first one in sales and review scores.

Some people like to point out that Little Big Planet didn't sell all that well in comparison to its hype. However, it is the second best selling platformer of this generation. And it sold over 2 million copies in a genre that has left its popularity in the 8 and 16 bit years far behind it. Still an innovative, arthouse platformer isn't going to have the massive popular appeal of a game like God of War III which has already had two massively successful installments on the PS2 and one on PSP. Like Uncharted God of War III is destined to sell over 3 million copies.

Gran Turismo 5 will be at the show probably with an announced release date of November 2009. And, once again it will be a highly successful game. Forza might be gaining in popularity so I don't know if GT5 will sell that many more copies than Forza in the Americas or Others, but in Japan GT5 will easily sell over a million copies and move consoles while Forza will be very lucky to sell over 50,000 copies in Japan.

New announcements from Kojima and Square would certainly make Sony the winner of E3.

I don't think there's any way that the 360 could have a stronger showing or really even come close. There biggest game is likely to be Alan Wake but Heavy Rain will be a serious rival for it. And, I predict Heavy Rain will be the more acclaimed game.

Nintendo will have to show off many core titles in traditional genres on Wii if they want to offset last year's showing. Metroid Prime Trilogy is a step in the right direction despite III's prior poor sales on the Wiim but they need more of that and less Wii Series product type games to be on display at the show.