CES is still a few weeks away and while I'm swapped with a long list of to-do's I am starting to think about CES which is less than a month away. While there's a bigger emphasis on gaming at the show this year outside of Microsoft, Sony, and Namco there aren't any other big game publishers making the trek to Vegas for the show. Sure there are a lot of other game related companies making the trip but most of that is the stuff that normally would be relegated to Kentia hall if this was E3. That's not a bad thing but I don't have a lot of expectations for big game stuff breaking at the show other than the Soul Calibur stuff on Wednesday. I'm hoping I'm wrong about that but we'll see how it pans out.
Instead I think we're going to see stuff that impacts gaming in an indirect way. The first being solid state drives (SSD) which are finally starting to appear in useful sizes. These should be mainstream enough by 2010 that Microsoft and Sony could start considering them as viable hard drive alternatives.
The second big thing I expect to see a lot of is OLED TV's. Last year we saw the small 15" TV that Sony was showing off and it was just amazing. This year there are rumors that we might see a 40" OLED TV which would be amazing. Not only are these TV's a lot thinner than standard LED TV's but the picture quality is off the charts. We probably won't see available for sale until 2010 at the earliest but it's really the next step in HDTV.
Outside of those two things I think we'll see a lot of incremental updates to products. I'm hoping sony will be showing off some of their big PS3 titles for 2008 like
Killzone 2 and
Little Big Planet.
I'm not sure what to expect from Microsoft. right now as they really don't have that big title for 2008 year. We might get word on
Gears of War 2 or
Alan Wake but outside of those two I'm guessing we'll get some more consumer oriented stuff. We're going to be talking to some MS execs on Monday and I'm already working on a set of questions about 2008 as Sony has built up a nice head of steam and Microsoft seems to be cooling off.