E3 would be 30 years old this year!
Looking back on it I kind of miss how it morphed from really dry presentations for stakeholders and market analysts to a, still awkward, parade of CEOs, pitchmen, and celebrities. The format of a live presentation where individual games will get more than a few minutes of fluff and buildup I think actually made it more tolerable to watch as far as corporate enterprises go. Of course with the demise of E3 proper, Geoff Keighley stepped up with a new format that can be summarised by images like this:
A common criticism of most E3 presentations was that they were stuffed with filler or CG renders that were not representative of anything, and that they should really just show gameplay the entire time. While understandable, addressing this request means that you essentially end up with a programme that has exhausting pacing. The PC gaming show can be seen as an antecedent to the model since it:
- tended to be about 3+ hours
- did not have a single platform-owner/publisher organising it
- were mostly trailers
Likewise the modern Keighley show is not a [game-making] corporation that is trying to carefully pitch and construct an argument for its products. It is closer to a convention but instead of boothspace, you charge for ad time:
the costs for getting your gameās trailer into Summer Game Festās main show this year [2024] start at $250,000 for 1 minute, $350,000 for 1.5 minutes, $450,000 for 2 minutes, and $550,000 for 2.5 minutes.
For those who canāt afford this price, the event becomes like a publisher, not of games, but of game announcements:
some āfree slotsā are provided to smaller, non-AAA games and studios. It appears that Keighley is sometimes pitched games to include and he provides some free airtime for these projects as part of the āearned editorial placementsā previously mentioned.
This is also deeply ironic since Keighleyās coverage of E3, although mostly promotional, did involve some attempts to hold CEOs accountable to a very basic level of journalistic criticism when he did interviews around the time. There is no similar thing any more since he himself is embedded in the production and cash flow.
I may be nostalgic for objectively awful corporate schlock but I feel like the rhythm has been lost. We could very easily just have a drip feed of all of these announcements throughout the year (in effect we already kind of do). The advantage to having them all collated into press events like this seems to be just that there isnāt much going on in the summer in terms of game releases/press events/financial year but Iām not sure if this is really true any more.
I guess what Iām getting at is that the current dominant format feels ersatz. Somehow Keighleyās show manages to come across as even more artificial than the corporate pageantry that preceded him. Though to be fair, it is not just him, almost all of these events follow a similar format now. If youāre going to have the ridiculous advert circus it would be more preferable for it to be at least entertaining (even if itās just for the sake of shared mockery) rather than the dense unpleasantness of blipverts.
Better to not really have an āE3ā at all but if it must happen can it be better, less dense? This is why I think the ones that follow the old style of curation with fewer games for a longer showcase generally tend to be more interesting (Tribeca Games Spotlight) despite being mostly prerecorded.
For whatever reason, I still feel compelled to watch and react to these and to share in the discussion of trends and detached observation.
