It’s not just games that are making a big splash at E3 this year

Tomorrow is the last day of the biggest event in the video game world – E3, a conference that has brought gamers, game studios, and game enthusiasts from around the world together to bask in all things games this week. If it sounds like a conference where you just get to geek out and play games for a week, well you’d be half right. Along with playing some of the latest-and-greatest games, some of which aren’t even going to hit the market this year, you also get to hear from the studios themselves about what they’re doing and where the gaming industry is going.

This afternoon Ubisoft took the stage joined by Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto (you know the guy who made Mario) to unveil a new Mario game along with a slew of other hits coming soon. While the expo doesn’t start until tomorrow, it’s pretty clear this is going to be an incredible year for E3 as the gaming world continues to grow like crazy. Heck, eSports could be in the Olympics in 2020.

Along with all the buzz around new games comes something that’s not a game, but is also already getting a lot of buzz leading up to the show – .GAME, the new go-to domain name extension for gamers. Major game studios like Blizzard, Nintendo and many more have already scooped up a number of .GAME domains related to their brand and games.

Blizzard Entertainment came out of the gate with a strong showing — the studio picked up .game domains for Warcraft, StarCraft, Hearthstone, Diablo and Heroes of the Storm during the early registration period, and got one for Overwatch when the game launched on May 24. If you thought you could beat companies to the punch for names like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo, you’re already out of luck. (Source – Polygon.com)

As a relatively new domain name extension the neat thing about .GAME is that there are still a lot of words available, many of which have been gone in extensions like .COM, .NET and .ORG for a very long time. Unlike most domains, .GAME doesn’t sell for $10 or $20, it costs $318.88 (marked down from $510 at Uniregistry) which means that people aren’t going to buy these by the dozen and just sit on them. Instead, it looks like most of the people registering .GAME domain names are actual game studios and game makers. Sidenote –> this week you can save $75 on a .GAME domain using coupon code – E32017GAME.

What I like about .GAME is that as a consumer, it’s pretty easy to identify what kind of content you’re going to find at that domain name. If I hear about void.com I have no idea what to expect, here, check-out void.com and see if that’s what you expected. On the other hand, void.game – yup, not surprisingly, it’s a game. Seeing the big studios adopt the extension is pretty neat and given how many new game developers there are out there I think soon we’ll all be used to finding games on a .GAME domain name.

If you’re at E3 this year, first – I’m jealous, second – make sure to check-out .GAME at booth #2550, the team will be there spreading the good word. Exciting times!