2007: The Year in Games

Join us as we take a look back at all the big stories that made 2007 one of the most exciting yet for games.

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July

Flip-flopping is an art video game executives are well versed in. Statements made one day are reversed the next. And so it was that Sony decided that rumble was cool again.

Early in the life of the PlayStation 3, when it was still mired in litigation with technology firm Immersion and desperate to show how cutting edge its console was, Sony bad-mouthed rumble, calling it an old feature and declaring that the future was all about tilt-control, which, not coincidentally, now formed the heart of the PS3's Sixaxis controller. In July it decided to go the other way again.

Sony revealed that it had worked out an agreement with Immersion that would allow the two companies to work together on bringing their technologies together again. It wasn't confirmation of a Dual Shock 3, but it was the next best thing.

Another area was Sony was taking endless criticism was over the pricing of the PlayStation 3. Previous months had seen adamant proclamations that there was to be no price cut, and if there were ways that would allow the company to make its console cheaper, those savings would be used to sooth the balance sheet. Then, just before E3 arrived, Sony decided to drop the console's price anyway.

As it turned out the price drop was for the US only. In the UK, Sony decided to lower the price of entry by bundling its hardware with an extra controller and some games.

July saw more rumblings about the failures of another crucial technology in the games industry: middleware. Used by game makers to ease development, middleware is currently dominated by one platform, Unreal Engine 3.0, the software that had already proven itself by powering Christmas's monster hit Gears of War. Among the growing list of unhappy Unreal Engine clients was Koei, which was forced to again push back its antigravity racer Fatal Inertia. Koei, however, was far from alone.

Gears of War was a big hit for Microsoft in 2006, but around the same time that millions of Xbox 360 owners were gleefully killing alien invaders, others were getting upset about hardware failures.

For all of the life of the Xbox 360, Microsoft had stubbornly refused to acknowledge any manufacturing flaws, but in August the pressure could build no more. The company said that it would replace all Xbox 360s affected by the so-called red ring of death, taking a $1 billion hit in the process. Warranties on Xbox 360 hardware were also increased to three years.

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