E3 Has Been Canceled

My guess is that we are 3 years away from some indy studio showing up with a tripple AAA title out of nowhere..

With small exceptions people buy AAA games from EA / Ubisoft / Activision / etc for the same reason why people go to watch christmas movies - they know what exactly they gonna get. No surprises.

Lucas Pope, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_Pope

> He is best known for experimental indie games, notably Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, both of which won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize alongside other awards.

Papers, Please was a really nice concept, executed well. It even inspired a few other games, like Contraband Police, which recently came out and is pretty okay (like a 3D spiritual successor, sort of).

Toby Fox, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toby_Fox

> He is known for developing the role-playing video games Undertale and Deltarune for which the former garnered acclaim and he received nominations for a British Academy Game Award, three Game Awards and D.I.C.E. Awards, the latter known as the video game equivalent of the Academy Awards.

Both Undertale and Deltarune didn't seem too impressive on a technical level (e.g. not going for flashy graphics like many modern titles), but the world building, the gameplay mechanics, the character writing and everything else just felt really, really nice and on point.

I guess both of those devs are a good example that projects with a good concept and even better execution are still likely to be quite successful. Personally, I'd definitely also throw the Outer Wilds game on top of this pile as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Wilds

Here's a documentary about its making: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbY0mBXKKT0 (spoilers)

However, such success won't be likely for the majority of the developers out there, which is to be expected. Not that people shouldn't make games that they are passionate about, just that they should set their own expectations accordingly.

Live Service games are dying off because not enough people are playing them.

Just like MMOs used to spin off and die two years later, Live Service Games are saturated to the point they can't last either.

No, not in my opinion. Even what they've done with mobile games (ex: Fire Emblem) has been tasteful.

Nintendo is obsessed with family values, in an honest way that comes from a place of genuine good.

If you want to work for one of the very last beacons of hope in the industry, go work there.

I play about a game a year on average, and I still follow the industry out of the corner of my eye. I most recently played Hades and it blew my mind, stylistically and gameplay-wise. It's like someone threw into a blender some of the best game concepts in the last four decades, a few books on Greek mythology, a dash of ingenuity and creativity, and a game came out - in what looks to be a fairly economical product, too.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of professionals trying to make honest-to-god works of interactive entertainment. And I wouldn't begrudge anyone trying their best to make a career work, anyway.

But:

> There's still so many good games without any of that crap though

Well, not enough to sustain an event of games that don't suck, apparently! E3 marked a video games summer solstice of sorts when I was a little kid, a feeling which permeated into my first job out of college.

But you're right, and I'm just being nostalgic: the art in its purest form will probably never die.

The only aspect I loved was the world visuals/themes/area transitions. Actual gameplay was not really fun for me

But isn't it interesting that 3 of the 5 games you've mentioned are sequels, and one of the remaining ones is part of a well-established formula?

It reminds me of the Age of Average, recently posted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703

I have been a genre fan for a very long time. Before the isometric/top-down dungeon crawler, there were First-person dungeon crawlers and I loved Eye Of The Beholder and Lands Of Lore indeed three decades ago now. And then of course Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Lord Of Destruction. All of that was good.

And came Diablo 3 and I didn't like the reviews so I waited and then I tried the game, I wanted it to be good so much, everyone said it plays better on console so for the first time in my life I got hold of a console, an Xbox 360 and played with it. I can't say I got hooked.

I did get hooked on Path Of Exile four years ago though.

So I tried Diablo 4 and it is a console-first game again which is a death knell to a game like this by itself, it can't be avoided, there's just more keys on the keyboard, your design field is narrowed to design for controllers. But it's also a hamfisted MMO. I want none of that.

Cyberpunk did, but I relegated it to the No Man's Sky category and never have any intention of buying it. Goodwill is a thing and losing it can permanently tarnish your reputation.

Maybe E3 found out Warhorse is not ready yet to announce KCD 2 so they decided it's not worth it to organize the whole thing

I hope they bring bloodborn to PC, it's the only palette swap of the genre I'm interested in.

Or maybe they will finally bring back Armored Core.

Traditionally E3 was about developers showcasing games for the press. But that's always been a bit of a tough sell for a major event, and I'm not surprised it's struggling given the current media landscape.

PAX is better at managing a public event. E3 wasn't originally open to the public, and once they opened up it was never done very well. If publishers want to have that public convention thing, PAX is better. Letting the public in to E3 sort of ruined the industry insider aspect of the convention, all the meetings moved to hotel rooms so that people could hear each other.

Why should a company choose to make their announcements have to fight against every other announcement in the entire industry. That’s a great way for your story to be buried.

If you hold your own event, it’s YOUR show. You can show what you want, when you want, your way. You don’t have to compete. You don’t have to pay someone else for the privilege.

Aren’t some companies dropping out (or at least holding many announcements back) from CES as well?

You no longer have to convince the press to cover you, you can reach your audience directly. For video games a trade show doesn’t make much sense.

International developers have a harder time of it since they need to travel long hours and sort out visas. And a lot of game dev is outside US. In general COVID kind of spurred rethinking of how much business travel is truly needed or desired.

If it's not a console game there is the publishers/developers own marketing or something like PAX or the Game Awards.

I'm gussing the industry side is now at GDC.

Subjectively, the few teens I interact with seem hyped for new installments in old franchises, updates to existing games with more content, or remakes of old classics. I don't think there's as much excitement for new franchises, because of a wave of overpromising over the last decade.

Nowadays it's much more common to learn about something through "influencer" media, and part of the appeal is not within the game content, but in the game's affordances as a virtual world: being able to play with your Discord friends or the Twitch streamer you watch, and how much it supports roleplaying and "content creation". A lot of gaming is also purely online-competitive, too, a phenomenon that relies on widespread broadband connectivity and isn't really about graphics - witness the popularity of online chess. The experiential games that hit big and stay memetic for long periods have mostly been indie lately: the AAA stuff has nice graphics and courts a certain niche, but it just washes over the market without much lasting impact.

Altogether, there are a ton of things that make it so that teenagers can be hyped, but not about the same things in the same ways. It's widely accessible stuff, and less clearly driven by the consumer-electronics relationship.

I'd say the floor of pax was about 20 percent emptier than last year, which was already abouu 30 percent emptier than pre-covid. Indie area was down by about half which was the biggest writing on the wall to me. Tabletop still going strong, but the vendors associated with them where also hit hard.

All of this has moved to The Game Awards now, probably because companies don't necessarily need to actually pay to attend. PAX is also still a thing.

> But maybe that's just me getting old.

Probably - all of the eyeballs are on twitter/youtube/facebook now and they can pay to shove themselves into your feed. Companies get more bank for their buck spending their millions of advertising budget on those platforms rather than spending that money on a day or two at a tradeshow.

Companies can now reach both the press and fans directly any time.

Back in its heyday E3 was purely a business event (e.g. you had to work in the games industry one way or another to be allowed in). Might have changed in recent years though, I didn't really pay attention anymore since around 2010 or so.