E3killed itself,Geoff Keighley said recently. The trade show, which for decades was the biggest gaming event of the year, is unofficially (but basically officially) dead and gone. Keighley is toutingSummer Game Festas its heir, but the truth is that E3 has been replaced by many different smaller shows that each only accomplish a fraction of what the June expo used to do all by itself.
For players, the difference isn’t — at least immediately — all that noticeable. E3, like Summer Game Fest, was an opportunity for fans to watch presentations showcasing lots of trailers for upcoming games. Who cares if that presentation falls under the banner of Summer Game Fest or E3? If you just want to see previews for the games that you will be able to play on yourPS5,Xbox Series X,PC, orSwitchin the next year or two, SGF is committed to doing just that.
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The real loss is behind-the-scenes, though this unseen loss has had an impact on those in the public, too. E3 was a time when journalists had the opportunity to reliably interview high-profile developers, publishers, and corporate leaders and, potentially, ask them tough questions. That wasn’t always the case — there were plenty of softball questions served up and easily batted back — but when background artwork fromCyberpunk 2077containing an exaggerated portrayal of a trans character was spotted at E3 2019,journalists could ask developers from CD Projekt Red about it almost immediately. E3 provided one reliable occasion, year in and year out, when journalists could ask the vast majority of the companies behind the biggest games tough questions.
E3 was also, unlike Summer Games Fest, last month’sPlayStation Showcase, or aNintendo Direct, a time when journalists could expect to get hands-on time with many of the games that were being presented. Viewers at home saw the presentations, but for journalists covering the show, that was only one part of what attending E3 offered. It was, more importantly, an opportunity to play many of the games themselves. E3 presentations and trailers could contain an awful lot of smoke and mirrors, but it’s much harder to fake a demo that people are actually going to play themselves. Summer Game Fest has moved toward incorporating this kind of hands-on time, but the scale is different. Whereas E3 included games from the three console manufacturers,SonyandNintendoaren’t involved with Summer Game Fest.UbisoftandMicrosoftare, but E3’s loss of relevance (even before COVID) meant that the biggest publishers didn’t have to play ball if they didn’t want to.
In this shift away from E3, corporations have benefited and regular people have been dealt a worse hand. Before, players could expect to hear from Sony, Nintendo, Xbox, all during the same week each and every year. This year, we heard from Nintendo in February, Sony in May, and will see an SGF showcase from Xbox in June. Unless you’re really plugged into gaming, there’s a good chance you’ll miss much of the news entirely. There’s no single time to pay attention. If you want to keep up, you basically need to be tuned in all year round, or at least, all summer.
Publishers have increasingly shifted toward only revealing information about upcoming games when it’s most convenient for them. No one is trying to win E3 anymore, so it’s common to go years without getting any new details from a studio you love. We used to have a pretty good idea of what the next few years would hold from each publisher, with a few surprises each summer that fleshed out the details. Now, I have very little idea what Nintendo and Sony have on the horizon. Xbox has made its slate of upcoming games well-known, but largely because it has had so little to show in the near term.
There’s no replacing E3. Now that companies know they can have a day all to themselves by doing their own presentations, they have no reason to come together under one roof. Summer Game Fest is attempting to get everyone at the table, but there are still plenty of empty chairs.
