5 ms·
It's sad, but E3 is really a relic of a bygone era. In the 90s or early 2000s, you almost never saw media from unreleased games. The best you could hope for was
by sylens 3y ago
It's sad, but E3 is really a relic of a bygone era. In the 90s or early 2000s, you almost never saw media from unreleased games. The best you could hope for was a few screenshots in a magazine (and later a website) to tide you over, surrounded by illustrative writing by games journalists. E3 was there to inform retailers of what products were coming, motivate them to dedicate shelf space to sell them, and lastly to provide a concentrated pile of news for the mainstream media to disseminate. This is why for so long the keynotes/showcases were called "press conferences". You can even find some recorded videos from these older E3's where Nintendo and Sony are presenting pie charts and graphs in a fairly monotone cadence.
Today, with the ubiquity of Youtube, Twitch, and other ways of seeing game footage and content, E3 just became another marketing event. And it was an expensive one at that. Publishers and platform holders chafed at the fact that they would have to do a live stage show where gaffes and demo disasters could occur, and marketing departments hated the fact that all of their effort could be easily overshadowed by another company's big reveal. You saw Sony tap out even before the pandemic hit, opting for its own separate showcases where they could control the message and dominate the news cycle. That became the model that more and more companies decided to pursue.
I will miss it because it was a fun event in the middle of May (and later June) that gave you a nice preview of what cool stuff was coming later in the year. There are also some legendary moments from the live presentations over the year, ranging from Sony getting on stage and only stating the price of the Playstation (which could undercut Sega's Saturn by $100, after Sega had decided to rush it for a surprise launch that day) to J Allard introducing the world to the new paradigm of centralized online gaming in 2005.
- ghaff 3y agoThe pandemic probably didn't ultimately change a lot of things as much as people thought it would early on. But there are certainly events that were stumbling along, mostly on momentum, that didn't make it to the other side.
- jeffwask 3y agoIt impacted E3 a bit more than some of the others because they were attempting to pivot from Vendor facing to public facing and compete against established Cons like Gamescon or PAX and the pandemic blew up any momentum they had. It was the interception of their hail mary to save the show.
- utexaspunk 3y agoIt's sort of like the PC User Groups that were more or less rendered redundant by the internet. I remember going to the HAL-PC (Houston Area League of PC Users) monthly general meetings as a kid and there could easily be over a thousand people there when they'd do things like having Microsoft and Lotus come and present their latest versions of Excel/123 in a "shootout". There were great door prizes, too. The internet came and there just wasn't a need for that anymore. It's kind of a shame, though, just because it felt like a real community thing.
- volkk 3y agoit's truly sad. i keep waiting for a trend reversal where people would instead prefer real life interaction because everyone's exhausted by the soulessness of zoom & screens. i really think it's coming, but i keep miscalculating when
- ghaff 3y agoYou basically don't attend the public sessions at events to learn things you couldn't learn otherwise. At least keynotes are almost always streamed and companies give out very little in the way of datasheets and other printed information which is all available online anyway. Yeah, there are breakout sessions, and they're a good way to have some focused time on something you're interested in. But anyone who regularly goes to conferences will tell you it's mostly about the hallway track.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoIRL events similar to E3 are still happening but worldwide and at a smaller scale. For example John Romero attended such an even in my insignificant EU country. It was awesome and not as expensive as E3 but of course much smaller so it couldn't cover as much as E3.
- dpkirchner 3y agoIt's happening here, where I'm at (smallish city in the PNW). I've started going to a near-weekly board game meetup where we inevitably talk about more than games (computers, sometimes news of the day). It's not a large group but it's about the same size as the Linux/UNIX groups I participated in a few decades ago.
- yreg 3y agoCompanies want to have as much control as possible over their own announcements. It reminds me of how Apple left Macworld in favour of hosting its own events. Or even (as you mention) abandoned live presentation altogether.
- Racing0461 3y ago> Or even (as you mention) abandoned live presentation altogether. The writing on the wall for this was when Steve Jobs died. Covid just gave them the nails. There's just so much that can go wrong (elon musk throwing the ball at the cybertruck window and it cracks for ex).
- ghaff 3y agoApple has so much in-house video production skill and so many more people want to watch Apple events than could possibly be accommodated in person. What's the point of jamming a crowd into the Yerba Buena Center or wherever when most people will be watching streaming anyway and you have so much more control over the results that way?
- Racing0461 3y agoWatching it live just feels better. Go back and watch one where they do it live and one where it does it pre-recorded. Something just feels off with the pre-recorded one. By live i mean they are doing the presentation on the spot, not live as in person BTW.
- sylens 3y agoJobs did have a penchant for making a live demo feel natural. With anyone else, it just doesn't feel the same. I much prefer the pre-recorded videos now.
- yreg 3y agoSteve was great at it, but maybe all it takes is for the presenter to be passionate about the thing they are presenting. Elon is a terrible live speaker and yet I think his keynotes are pretty good. Also, we've all made fun of Steve Ballmer, but he was good at this as well. Meanwhile, listening to Tim or Sundar is much less captivating. Perhaps if Tim could do a presentation about optimizing supply chains he would do much better than when he's at presenting iPad games.
- MBCook 3y agoIt really was an event for the magazine era. As they lost importance, and easily showing video became possible, it was on borrowed time.
- tetris11 3y agoI remember when different magazines would get different exclusive screenshots for the PS2's Spiderman 2, and I would log in every single day to a BBS forum in the internet cafe to see if someone had uploaded the screenshot.
- jollyllama 3y agoVirtually nobody was using BBS's during the PS2 era. That was just a forum.
- nightski 3y agoIt really isn't though. The video game awards are pretty huge. It just wasn't managed well. This is more a product of Sony & Microsoft not only buying all the studios but also then wanting to have their own showcases and not have compete with each other on stage. To me this all kind of started back in E3 2013 when the PS4 & Xbox One were being unveiled.
- Racing0461 3y agoThey could have adapted to the modern era instead of getting wiped out.
- doublepg23 3y agoI don't agree at all. The Video Game Awards from last week was critiqued for being mostly previews of upcoming games. E3 was poorly managed.
- starburst 3y ago> mostly previews of upcoming games It's the reason 99% of the viewers watch it
- rvba 3y agoHow can you give an award to an upcoming game? By definition that game is not finished yet...
- sylens 3y agoThe awards are for games that have come out over the past year. But they're juxtaposed by trailers and announcements for new games that will release in the next year or two. To be fair, it's really the inverse - it's a majority trailer/announcement showcase with some video game awards in the middle.