Big Picture Mode
Industry issues given the widescreen treatment
Nathan Brown prepares for the subtle changes of his seventh E3
This is a pig of a column to write – and a very difficult issue overall, in fact. While you’ll be reading this after E3, the game industry’s annual measuring contest, is over and done with, we’re going to press a few days before we board the plane to LA. Now, I believe Edge readers are sympathetic to this, and understand that a magazine that thunks through their letterboxes just a few days after an event must naturally have been made beforehand. But, nonetheless, we want to be as timely as possible. We need some E3 in here – not just on the cover, but throughout.
I could use this page to make a few safe predictions. I could consult the tea leaves and state that Phil Spencer will have undergone as many costume changes during the Xbox press conference as Lady Gaga did at the Met Gala, albeit by sacking off the haute couture thing in favour of a load of game-logo T-shirts he got off Redbubble. Bethesda will have booked, for its aftershow party, a punk band from an era that makes Todd Howard feel young enough for his leather jacket. I will always have been low-level hungry, no matter how much I’d eaten, and 6/10 hungover, regardless of what (or whether) I drank the night before. I would be late for at least six appointments, and just about apologetically British enough to get away with it.
Bit of a cop-out, though, isn’t it? And that’s the problem with E3, or at least the source of a lot of people’s problems with it: it is too predictable, playing out in substantially the same way every year, the same bombastic press conferences and show-floor demos for what are ultimately the same games, just with different names. And that while it stays the same it falls ever further behind the increasingly broad industry it is intended to showcase. I can understand that perspective. But on the ground, E3 has changed significantly, even over the handful of years I’ve been attending (this year’s is my seventh). This year looks no different.
When I first went, in the year 1872 – okay, 2013 – the industry was struggling to
come to terms with the end of the booth-babe era. Which is to say they were still there – stationed every ten yards at the Ubisoft booth, giving out drinks in vest tops and camo shorts at the Wargaming party – but were a little more covered up, and a little less in your face about it. The following year they were gone, and a chat with a developer friend was punctuated by a visit from the feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian. This is where you see change: not in the pompous bluster of a publisher press conference, but in the margins, the small little details that hint at bigger things to come. That said, even the big names have changed their ways over the years. I haven’t seen a sales graph at a press conference yet. The days of passing off pre-rendered trailers or ‘target renders’ as gameplay footage are behind us. In 2013 you had to hunt for indie games; now they’re front and centre on the big stages, and are some of the first appointments we schedule on our calendars. Shigeru Miyamoto taking the stage at the Ubisoft presser in 2017 to announce Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle was, at the time, a moment for the ages, but it also hinted at something bigger. Fast forward to today and the walls between companies are coming down, through cross-platform play, through collaboration, and if those Xbox-on-Switch rumours are true, even between consoles.
Mercifully, the way we cover the show has changed as well – and not just thanks to the tweak in our production schedule that means I will never repeat the events of E3 2015, when I spent every evening working until 2am in my hotel room to hit print deadline. Six years ago I used a recorder for interviews, lugged my laptop around so I could get the audio file off over USB and email it back to the home team to transcribe (or do it myself between appointments). Now I record interviews on my phone and upload the audio to the cloud and an AI transcription service while I walk to my next appointment. And y’all thought print was for dinosaurs.
None of this is to pretend that all is sunshine and rainbows at E3. The past couple of years, as it has wrestled with how to accommodate the public, have clearly been a problem. More worrying is the exodus of big publishers and platform holders, fed up of spending millions on floor space to compete in a battle for attention that gets harder every year. But as I prepare to board the plane, I feel only optimism. I’ll be looking in the margins for signs of change. I’ll be sure to report back – once I’m over the jetlag, anyway.
While E3 stays the same it falls ever further behind the increasingly broad industry it is intended to showcase