There are some attendees at last week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo gathering in Los Angeles who have been coming to the event for nearly two decades. They have witnessed major changes in the gaming industry, from the days when titles were sold only on disc to a new age where online livestreaming and data analysis dominate the field.

“The whole game industry has so fundamentally changed over the last 17 years,” said Katie Stone Perez (pictured), director of Mixer interactive and developer success at Microsoft, referring to how long she has attended the annual E3 show. “We had no player data; we had no way of knowing how far into the games our players were getting. Now we have all this telemetry, all of these experiences.”

Stone-Perez spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the E3 event in Los Angeles. They discussed Mixer’s low-latency technology and how the gaming industry addresses the right degree of game difficulty. (* Disclosure below.)

‘Faster-than-light’ technology

Mixer is the interactive, livestreaming game platform of Microsoft Xbox. It has staked a position in the gaming space through its “faster-than-light” technology to deliver content at less than one second of latency.

The lowest possible latency is important for streamers to see interactive comments linked in real time to the actions performed on the screen. “Exactly what’s happening in the game, that’s what people are seeing,” Stone-Perez said. “You can see what I’m doing on Mixer and how that’s having an impact within your game. That has paved the way for this richer conversation.”

It’s hard to imagine now, but the roots of today’s livestreaming game industry were formed in the days of coin-operated machines. Drop in a coin, lose and then drop in another. Yet, although the technology has changed dramatically since then, the difficulty of winning remains an issue of debate within the gaming community.

“We had to kill you off because we needed you to put another quarter in the machine,” Stone-Perez noted. “We carry that trope with us. Across our broader audience we need to think about how to be more inclusive in our design.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the E3 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for E3 2018. Neither Western Digital Corp., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE