Scan the column to the right of the Kotaku.com/Power 40 list and you'll find our reorganized list of power-players in gaming, updated through the end of June, with lots of notes in each entry about why people have moved up or down.
This month's update has a lot of shifting. June is, after all, a huge month for the video game industry with a ton of unveilings and announcements at E3. We're also making room for two new additions—a combo entry for BioWare Doctors Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, and one for Gaikai founder David Perry. They, of course, bump two other entries off the list.
The standout achievements this month include a big rise for Square Enix's Yoichi Wada due to his company's next-gen Luminous engine and strong showings of Hitman and Tomb Raider as well as for Yves Guillemot, whose Ubisoft had an amazing showing of current and possibly-next-gen games at E3.
We've got a rise for Activision Blizzard's head honcho, thanks to, among other things, a joint Call of Duty project by Activision and Tencent that moves that series into China. Tencent's Pony Ma gets a boost, too. Buying part of Epic helped his case. Be sure to peruse the rest of the list for many updates, including game reveals and other industry movement.
BioWare's two chiefs take the place of our former 40th entrant, BioWare fans. The fans' unprecedented protest agains the ending of Mass Effect 3 got BioWare to work on extending and even altering the game's conclusion(s), but once BioWare released its extended cut, the power to move the Mass Effect series and BioWare's other franchises seems more firmly back in the grip of BioWare itself.
Dave Perry goes in thanks to the potency the cloud-gaming movement gained after Sony spent more than a third of a billion dollars buying Perry's streaming gaming service Gaikai. His addition helped bump out Entertainment Software Association chief Michael Gallagher. The ESA lobbies Washington on behalf of the gaming industry, but it's higher-profile mid-year task involves running E3. This year's E3 was a spectacle, but was filled with doubts as to the show's long-term dominance in the face of the Gamescoms and PAXes as well as in an age when a company like Nintendo can make most of its E3 news through web-streams, before, during and after the ESA's big show.
Not making the list this month was new head of THQ gaming, Jason Rubin, who will climb on to the rankings if he's able to help turn the beleaguered publisher around. THQ's good E3 showing with Metro: Last Light and Company of Heroes 2 products, presumably influenced by Rubin's predecessor, Danny Bilson, showed that the revival Rubin needs is not impossible.
We took a look at the industry's current status and progression this month to assess who are the most powerful players that influence what we play, how we play, how we get our games and/or what we think of games.
Check back in at the end of this month for our re-analysis.