How's the old saying go? At E3, you can have any kind of game you want, as long as it's a shooter.

As the E3 Expo, the videogame industry's annual bombastic show of force, begins anew Tuesday, it's getting harder and harder to tell one game from another. This is not simply because of the unceasing epileptic blasts of light and deafening cacophony of sound that fill the darkened halls of the Los Angeles Convention Center all week – although those help.

It's because as gamemakers come to grips with the ever-riskier business of building big-budget entertainment, more and more of them are playing it safe just to survive, feeding in the same narrowing pool of game genres.

"You're going to play [simulation] games and shooter games, and that's all the choice you're going to get," says Wedbush game industry analyst Michael Pachter. "It's sad."

The first-person shooter has been perennially popular ever since the days of Doom, but Activision has blown everything else away with its Call of Duty franchise, the latest of which has become the best-selling videogame ever in the United States. At E3, Activision will show the next game in the series, Modern Warfare 3, but more significantly will introduce the Call of Duty Elite service, a play to turn its customers into monthly subscribers.

"I think [developers] see 30 million Call of Duty, Medal of Honor or Battlefield purchases every year and think, 'My God, this genre's really huge, I gotta have a piece of it,'" Pachter says.

Practically every publisher at E3 will feature a shooter in its booth, even ones that have typically shied away from the genre. Electronic Arts is attempting to fight rival Activision head-on with Battlefield. Ubisoft is taking its Tom Clancy games into the freemium model. Even Japanese publishers like Square Enix, Sega and Namco Bandai, whose domestic customers don't really like shooters, are publishing them in an attempt to broaden Western appeal.

"Insomniac, Bungie and Respawn are working on games," says Pachter. "Gee, duh, what do you think they are? They're gonna be shooters. God save us when [Gears of War maker] Epic goes multiplatform. When the Gears trilogy is over, we'll get another shooter."

Eric Hershberg, CEO of Call of Duty maker Activision Publishing, says that chasing existing genres won't work unless your games have a unique hook. Earlier this year, Activision sliced several games out of its portfolio, killing properties like the Guitar Hero series and its planned open-world game True Crime.

"There's not a lot of appetite for just another racing game or just another open-world game," he says. "There needs to be something baked into it that's truly unique or truly motivating in order for new franchises to gain traction."

Instead, he says, Activision is concentrating on improving the small slate of games it will publish this year with features like the Call of Duty Elite social networking service.

Jesse Divnich, VP of capital research and communications for Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, says there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

"Consumers are more open to new forms of enjoying entertainment when the technology itself is new," he told Wired.com in an e-mail. "New intellectual properties are far more likely to achieve long-term success ... if launched in the first two years of a [hardware] cycle."

"This is not something that game companies are necessarily imposing on gamers; this is something that gamers have taught game companies," Activision CEO Hirshberg says. "If you look at the top 10 games of last year, eight of them were existing franchises ... there's a desire to go deeper into the worlds [and] spend more time with fewer games."

In other words, it's our fault – gamers are more likely to buy new and innovative games like Assassin's Creed when we're all agog over our brand new consoles, but later on we settle in with proven hits. If we're to see more variation in the types of games companies release, Divnich says, we'll have to wait for more-powerful game machines.

Well, those are going to be a ways off. Microsoft and Sony haven't made any rumblings at all about successors to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

The only console maker that is introducing a new machine at E3 is Nintendo. But it needs to: Its super-successful Wii console is speeding along toward near-total irrelevancy in the minds of dedicated gamers. The major software publishers have stopped creating big new projects for it, and even Nintendo's own release list is slim pickings.

"It's too bad that Nintendo's where they are, because they're the guys that do keep it fresh," Pachter says. They always have creative nonshooter games that are fun."

But analysts don't expect Nintendo's new box, which it will introduce Tuesday, to be a major push forward in terms of raw processing power. Pachter says he expects it to draw up alongside the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and attract publishers by letting them easily bring their games to all three platforms. That's great for Nintendo, but not necessarily solving the problem.

Some shooters, like BioShock Infinite, color outside the lines with poignant drama and inventive gameplay. Image courtesy Irrational Games

Bright Spots ————

The one relatively new game concept for Activision this year is called Skylanders, a brand new take on the Spyro the Dragon series of games. The many different playable characters in Skylanders are stored on action figures, which communicate with the game system via a USB device. By buying the action figures, you can play the game with your own personalized characters on game machines, smartphones or the Web, Hirshberg says.

"Everything that character experiences gets written back onto the brain of the toy," he says. "We feel we have that true innovation, that secret sauce."

That's cool for the youngsters, but what about more mature audiences? There are some truly innovative games on the horizon, even if they are, technically, shooters. By sticking with a genre or a franchise that fans already know, but making changes within that framework, publishers can minimize risk while doing something new and exciting.

Wedbush's Pachter points to BioShock Infinite from 2K Games as an example of a unique experience in a well-worn genre. The upcoming game drops players into a fictionalized version of an ultranationalist America, offering a thoughtful political, romantic story along with the shooting.

The advance preview that 2K gave of its E3 demo was a roller-coaster ride filled with suspense, story and genuine moments of surprise.

>'There’s room for innovation in the story-driven shooter.'

"There's room for innovation in the story-driven shooter," Pachter says. He also points to Bethesda's open-world game Prey 2 and id Software's Rage as experimental games that take the genre to new places.

Electronic Entertainment Design and Research's Divnich says the emergence of high-quality free-to-play online games also presents an opportunity to innovate.

"The freemium or free-to-play market is ripe right now, very ripe," he says. "Personally, I don't like to see brands cross over between platforms and business models. It is very low-risk, but it also comes with the high unlikelihood of becoming a big success."

Divnich says Ubisoft should keep its Tom Clancy license on its free-to-play online shooter but create a new brand around it instead of sticking with the Ghost Recon name, if it wants to truly hit it big.

Ironically, it could be a game genre that got thoroughly played out a few years ago that ends up feeling fresh and new in a sea of samey shooters.

"I have to wonder if Saints Row The Third becomes a huge breakout hit this holiday season," says Divnich, referring to the Grand Theft Auto-style open world game coming from publisher THQ. "Gamers are drowning in first-person shooters right now, to the point where the classic sandbox-style game ... may be refreshing for a lot of us."

What can you do in Saints Row? Well, you can shoot people, of course. But you also have the option of beating them with a giant dildo.

How does that saying go? Beggars can't be choosers.

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