Not there

Nick Bilton has an article in The New York Times about a recent conference, and who wasn't there:

The big names were all there last week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the video game industry’s annual conclave: Microsoft, with its XBox; Sony, with its PlayStation; and Nintendo, with its Wii. But they all make console games, and these days the game platforms enjoying the most explosive growth are a social network, Facebook, and a mobile device maker, Apple.
Neither was represented here (though Apple rarely appears at industry events), but they were the elephants in the room. Everyone noticed their absence, even if the big three tried to brush off their importance.
“Imagine the type of amazing game Nintendo could make for an iPhone, yet they can they barely even acknowledge that the iOS platform exists, and has the potential to eviscerate their portables business,” said Joel Johnson, editorial director for Kotaku, a popular online video game blog. “Nintendo has owned portable gaming for years, but are still wedded to the idea that they have to sell the game and the platform.”
As if underscoring the point, Albert Penello, director for marketing at Microsoft, said in an interview: “This concept of games that are more bite-sized and more casual is something we get, but our primary focus is Xbox 360 and Kinect right now.”
What could be called iElephant loomed particularly large. Over the past year, Apple’s mobile operating system, which powers the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, has become one of the largest mobile gaming platforms in the world. Apple’s mobile users can now pick among a hundred thousand games and entertainment applications to play on their mobile devices, said Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president for iPhone software, speaking at the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco last week. The company also said it now had fifty million registered users on its social gaming platform, Game Center. Citing these numbers, Mr. Forstall told the conference attendees that the iPod Touch had become “the most popular gaming platform on the planet.”
Meanwhile, as Mr. Johnson said, Facebook has also become an important gaming platform. Zynga, which makes online games for Facebook, including the hugely popular Farmville, has tens of millions of users who play Facebook’s free games on a daily basis. “You have this eight-hundred-pound, ten-billion-dollar gorilla in the room that is Zynga and, just like Apple, is not even mentioned in the same breath as the other three main competitors,” Mr. Johnson said.
On the conference floor, the demonstration suite of Electronic Arts, publishers of the popular games Angry Birds, FIFA Soccer, and The Sims, seemed to have more iPads and iPod Touch devices than are on display in an average Apple store.
“The iPhone was a long time coming in this industry and I think mobile is one of the most important gaming platforms that will ever exist for gaming,” said Travis Boatman, senior vice president for worldwide studios for Electronic Arts. But Mr. Boatman said that though his company had a strong focus on mobile gaming, it was still aggressively committed to other gaming consoles and was “platform agnostic” when it came to game development. Electronic Arts currently offers more than fifty games in the Apple iTunes Store. Many of its most popular games are available on other consoles too, including the portable Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. An employee showed off new Electronic Arts games, using an Apple iPad 2 plugged into a large flat-screen television. As he played a first-person-shooter video game, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, it seemed as if the iPad was essentially the controller for the game. No expensive gaming console was necessary.
Apple devices are not the only platform for mobile games; the discussion also centered on Google Android, which has become the most popular smartphone platform in the United States, and now has thousands of games in its arsenal too. But plenty of game makers still have faith in the console. Activision, maker of the popular console game Modern Warfare, wasn’t entirely sold on the benefits of mobile devices for immersive gameplay. “There are 400,000 apps in the iTunes app store,” said Eric Hirshberg, chief executive of Activision. “I don’t want to be number 400,001.” And Activision doesn’t need to jump on the same game wagon as other developers, yet. Earlier this year, its latest hit, Call of Duty: Black Ops, attracted $650 million in its first five days on sale.
Yet,one official action of the Electronic Entertainment Expo spoke volumes about the importance of the mobile game platform: for the first time, the group did not bother to put up a mobile gaming booth. “We decided to forgo a separate mobile pavilion this year because it is clear that mobile gaming is no longer different from other forms of video games,” a spokeswoman for the conference said. “Mobile gaming is everywhere now. It didn’t make sense to separate it at the convention either.”
Another elephant stalked the halls of the conference all week: the question of security in Sony’s PlayStation network.
At a news conference held by Sony, that felt more like a rock concert than a press event because it was held on a huge stage in a stadium, Jack Tretton, the chief executive of Sony America, apologized to customers for the data breach that knocked the PlayStation Network off-line for almost a month.
In an interview later, Mr. Tretton defended the company’s security methods, even in the face of a barrage of successful attacks on Sony’s servers. “This was a real wake-up call we had to go through,” he said, “but now we feel our systems are more secure that they have ever been.”
But, on the same day of the interview, a group of hackers claimed to have breached the company’s servers again. Security experts estimated that this was the eighteenth successful attack on Sony in the last two months. The hacking seems to have affected Sony’s business. Mr. Tretton said in the interview that network activity was “currently at ninety percent what it was before the outage.” This means that ten percent of its users, almost seven million people, have not returned to the service.

Rico says he doesn't use any of these services, so it don't matter a damn to him...