E3 Is Sorely Missed

It’s been some 15 years since I first started covering E3 and it’s been almost like a religious holiday to me ever since. It’s Christmas without the drunken uncle and his racist rants.

It was pretty obvious that it was on its last legs these past few years. What can the organisers possibly offer today that publishers can’t just do themselves online? “Come be part of our big named event – bring money”.

As a business, it was going the same way as Blockbuster. But as a shared communal experience, I really do miss it. Sony, Nintendo and Xbox, all vying for hearts and minds. Marketing departments having to make their biggest splashes to compete for discussion time on forums. That just doesn’t really exist anymore.

Why spend tens of thousands on a conference hall if you can just release a press release? Why end your State of Play on your biggest “mic drop” moment if you can spread out your news over two months and dominate the cycle over and over?

We’re living in the age of crafted news. On every level. That’s not a good thing, but at least in video games it’s not world-ending. We’re not immune to it, it just means we have to wait longer to find out the most basic things. The day we’ll be able to buy of God of War, for instance, will be a big reveal. The day we’ll be able to give Sony our money is something they’re making us wait for, and those we don’t deserve it. There will be research and statistics and endless number-crunching to say a specific day on which we want it enough to make us go and pre-order, or otherwise just want it more. It’s bizarre, and a little bit predatory.

But that’s business.

E3 – More Than Business

Nonetheless, there was something different about E3, bubbling away beneath the surface. On top this is all it was. But what it became was a celebration of gaming. It became about the excitement of new titles, of new hardware, of new features. It was about guessing who would screw up the most this year (Ubisoft – always Ubisoft).

When there was one week of gaming news a year, you tuned in. Today the biggest gaming acquisition of all time can be published on Xbox Wire on a random day in January.

I miss that structure, and even the current mode of still kind of having events in June hasn’t replaced it. It feels a lot more controlled – a lot more sanitized. That’s mostly because this stuff is so heavily pre-recorded. It’s all so carefully managed.

I suspect part of this is down to covid. Nobody has anything to show. Games that we know about are getting delayed left, right and centre, and stuff we don’t know about is probably pushing back even more.

It’d be nice to think that in years to come, other publishers will get back into the fray. We’ll be able to have our week of gaming news all over again.

More likely people will decide fighting for the same spot is a bad idea. January will be PlayStation month, February will be Xbox Month. EA can have March.

It’s all too structured. It’s all too clean. And I miss the rougher, messier E3.