Tokyo Game Show: On the hunt for the next Minecraft

The staggering $2.5 billion that Microsoft has just shelled out for Minecraft and its quirky graphics will be foremost in developers' minds at the Tokyo Game Show this week, where simple yet immersive games are expected to figure heavily.
After seeing the tech titan bid to cash in on the 100 million people who spend hours constructing their own Minecraft worlds and share them online, industry figures will be looking for the next big thing at the four-day event.
Asia's largest digital entertainment exhibition, which kicks off on Thursday in the vast hangar-like buildings of Makuhari just outside Tokyo, will have a whole section for gaming with a social side.
It is already big business -- games played online or accessed through sites such as Facebook are hot on the heels of traditional consoles and are set, by some estimates, to overtake them in terms of revenue in the not-too-distant future.
"Nowadays most games have some social features included in them, which has led to an increase in the number of end-users," said market research firm Reportlinker.
The research company dates the take-off of social gaming to the success of Farmville, a simulation game hosted initially by Facebook in 2009 in which users build farms with their friends.
The global video game industry was worth a whopping 6.3 trillion yen (around $59 billion) in 2013. A full 70 percent of that is through downloads via console, PC or smartphone, according to Japanese game specialists Enterbrain.
"Games have moved from the console package to the data packet," said Enterbrain.