Big Picture Mode
Industry issues given the widescreen treatment
Nathan Brown’s thoughts turn to sunny LA, and the clouds over E3
The sun came out last week and Drake’s Nice For What came up on Spotify, prompting a sensation I don’t normally feel in February: cor, I can’t wait for E3. Every year, as soon as it’s warm enough for me to roll down the car window and crank the volume, thoughts inevitably turn to Los Angeles in June. E3’s been changing steadily over the past couple of years. This year it seems likely to change even more. The way some people are talking about it, it could even be the last one.
EA started doing its own thing with the Play event in 2016, and Microsoft also partquit the conference last year. But both companies understood they couldn’t really abandon E3. The first EA Play was crammed into a former hotel just around the corner from the LA Convention Centre; last year the Xbox operation moved into the newly acquired Microsoft Theater that’s just over the road. Both companies wanted to do their own thing, but understood that they still had to fundamentally operate on E3’s terms: to be in Los Angeles during that one magical week when the eyes of the global game industry, and all its observers and supporters, were fixed on a single place. Microsoft and EA weren’t at E3, except they were.
This year will be different, with Sony quitting the show entirely: no press conference, no booth, no nothing. Shawn Layden, CEO of SIE Worldwide Studios, has in a roundabout way blamed E3 itself for the PlayStation operation skipping the show, saying that the decision to let the hoi polloi through the doors in 2017 had dulled E3’s focus. By straddling the divide between fan event and trade show, he said, E3 was “in the middle of the highway, and it’s going to get hit by cars on both sides.” In a later interview, after Sony had formally pulled out of E3 2019, he said it had become “a trade show without a lot of trade activity. The world has changed, but E3 hasn’t necessarily changed with it.”
Like EA and Microsoft, Layden here is trying to have it both ways. E3 has either
changed or it hasn’t, and his pronouncements aren’t especially helpful when you consider that what’s really changed is that Sony has run out of games. The natural consequence of showing your hand as early as Sony has at E3 throughout this generation is that, at some point, you will run out of things to announce. Whatever games Sony has in development today for release in two or three years are being made for a console it hasn’t announced yet. Its E3 line-up has dwindled over the past couple of years; this year, it pretty much has nothing. While there’s absolutely sound logic in not unduly raising expectations, Layden’s attempt to pin this on E3, rather than his own company, is at best misguided and, at worst, irresponsible.
He is right, though, that E3 has changed, and is struggling to find its place in the era of livestreaming, lightning-fast news cycles and developers and players being able to talk directly to each other without needing to go through the press. It became an event for the public long before the organisers let the general masses through the show’s doors – ever since video cameras were first set up in the press conferences, this has been as much an event for the person on the street as the one in the industry. And retailers, who used E3 to help inform their buying decisions, don’t really need it either – you don’t have to fly all the way to Los Angeles to know that you need to order in lots of copies of the new Mario or Elder Scrolls. And while the meeting rooms around the periphery of the main halls were as busy as ever last year, E3 is hardly the only opportunity for the industry’s moneymakers to sign contracts.
Layden, and the wider PlayStation operation, have made the calculation that if you don’t have much to say you’re better off out of the conversation; that they will look worse by turning up with not very much than by simply not turning up at all. I’m not sure I agree. For all that E3 has become less relevant in a lot of ways, it remains the starting station of the industry’s hype train. GDC, PAX, Gamescom and all the rest are all well and good, but nothing lights a fire under this medium like that one special week in Los Angeles each year, where everything happens all at once, a joyous mess of excitement, anticipation and scandal. It remains the best opportunity we have for coverage, for networking, and for working out where the industry is headed. We still need it, and we still love it. And if you take away my annual chance for a week away from the kids in the California sunshine, I shall simply scream.
For all that E3 has become less relevant in a lot of ways, it remains the starting station of the industry’s hype train