E3 Is Officially Dead | Hacker News Reader

E3 Is Officially Dead

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295 pointseXpl0it3r210 comments

It's sad, but E3 is really a relic of a bygone era. In the 90s or early 2000s, you almost never saw media from unreleased games. The best you could hope for was a few screenshots in a magazine (and later a website) to tide you over, surrounded by illustrative writing by games journalists. E3 was there to inform retailers of what products were coming, motivate them to dedicate shelf space to sell them, and lastly to provide a concentrated pile of news for the mainstream media to disseminate. This is why for so long the keynotes/showcases were called "press conferences". You can even find some recorded videos from these older E3's where Nintendo and Sony are presenting pie charts and graphs in a fairly monotone cadence.

Today, with the ubiquity of Youtube, Twitch, and other ways of seeing game footage and content, E3 just became another marketing event. And it was an expensive one at that. Publishers and platform holders chafed at the fact that they would have to do a live stage show where gaffes and demo disasters could occur, and marketing departments hated the fact that all of their effort could be easily overshadowed by another company's big reveal. You saw Sony tap out even before the pandemic hit, opting for its own separate showcases where they could control the message and dominate the news cycle. That became the model that more and more companies decided to pursue.

I will miss it because it was a fun event in the middle of May (and later June) that gave you a nice preview of what cool stuff was coming later in the year. There are also some legendary moments from the live presentations over the year, ranging from Sony getting on stage and only stating the price of the Playstation (which could undercut Sega's Saturn by $100, after Sega had decided to rush it for a surprise launch that day) to J Allard introducing the world to the new paradigm of centralized online gaming in 2005.

It's sort of like the PC User Groups that were more or less rendered redundant by the internet. I remember going to the HAL-PC (Houston Area League of PC Users) monthly general meetings as a kid and there could easily be over a thousand people there when they'd do things like having Microsoft and Lotus come and present their latest versions of Excel/123 in a "shootout". There were great door prizes, too. The internet came and there just wasn't a need for that anymore. It's kind of a shame, though, just because it felt like a real community thing.

Yeah, broadband basically killed the LAN party scene as well.

As a teenager my friends and I got into hosting occasional LAN parties. The very first were so we could play Doom deathmatch over serial connections lol. But anyhow it was something I really liked.

When I moved halfway across the country I didn't know anyone. I googled around and found the local major LAN parties. I went to one that was hosted every couple of months in a union hall, with around 200 attendees. At the first one I ended up sitting next to a group of chill folks, and they let me know they did their own dozen person party every other Saturday.

So I started attending that, and it resulted in several life long friendships. We've all changed, grown, moved, had kids, etc but most of us are still in touch. Even for the folks that moved away we meet up every summer or two and do a canoe camping trip or such.

Now, to be fair, I've made life long friends purely on the internet as well, but I do miss those old LAN party days. It was a lot of fun staying up until dawn playing rocket arena et all over and over.

Also to be fair the LAN parties were not hospitable to women, especially the larger ones. On the rare occasion they did try it out they'd get hounded by the least socially aware idiots in the room, and no one else really did anything about it (including myself, as I didn't understand these dynamics at that age).

These days with discord and everything some of that vibe is back in the purely online context, but still I don't think there will ever really be anything like those in person events.

LAN parties were cool, imo and led to interesting things like this pic that's been on the interwebs for a very long time.

https://assetsio.reedpopcdn.com/duct-taped_gamer_1.jpg?width...

I still have a 48-port Cisco Switch that we used for these, back in the day. It's 10/100, so that far back. ;)

Yeah, we never taped anyone to the ceiling but that was very much the vibe of our regular little 12 person group. The host lived at his parents house (college student) and they had an addition on the side of the garage that we packed into.

A big deal for us was pooling money to buy a 24 port 10 mbit switch back when those were new and fancy. Such a huge improvement over having to shut down the whole party and redo coax connections because one person in the middle of the line wanted to leave early.

I was the IT connection. I worked with the gear daily, so it was easy to borrow gear or just MitM it when it was headed for the dumpster.

I kept it because memories, but it's a big ass rack switch, so it may go the way of the dodo someday.

We had women at our LAN parties in the 2000s, usually GFs or girls from the friend group. Not many played games so they'd just hang out and socialise amongst themselves or maybe play a console if there was one. So much fun.

Yeah, the only woman that showed up to that smaller dozen person regular event was my gf. Once.

I kinda understated what I was saying in the above because I didn't wanna get hounded by the basement dweller crowd, but the reality at the bigger events was pretty ugly. The only girl that ever showed up was the daughter of one of the organizers. Only a couple women showed up otherwise.

One story I can mention is from a different party I went to in a town not far away. This was a big bigger of an event, around 300 people and only run once a year. I only recall a woman showing up once.

That event held a 1v1 quake tourney with a modest cash prize. This woman was good. She smoked everyone easily. This was a bit of a shock because a couple people at that event had competed at quakecon and such.

The entire time she was at the event there was this mob surrounding her PC of... well, imagine the least socially aware and hygienic dudes that would show up to an early 00's LAN party. Didn't matter what she was doing or trying to play, they endlessly pestered her and tried to chat her up. If she walked across the room to get a coke you could see half the room openly staring at her turning their heads. Stuff like that.

Unsurprisingly she didn't return for the second day or any future event.

it's truly sad. i keep waiting for a trend reversal where people would instead prefer real life interaction because everyone's exhausted by the soulessness of zoom & screens. i really think it's coming, but i keep miscalculating when

> it's truly sad. i keep waiting for a trend reversal where people would instead prefer real life interaction because everyone's exhausted by the soulessness of zoom & screens. i really think it's coming, but i keep miscalculating when

I don't think this is a "trend," so much as the environment changing in unhealthy ways that we're not adapted for.

It's like a tree whose seeds will only germinate if the ground is just the right conditions, if the climate changes and those conditions no longer occur, it's not all the sudden going to start making seeds that germinate in other conditions. It's just going to fail to reproduce.

If the past, there was a lot more necessity to going out of the house, which has a lot of important side-effects, because you couldn't accomplish certain goals any other way. Technology provides easier and more isolating ways of achieving those goals, removing the necessity of going out. Now the needed side-effect are activities that require will, but people aren't set up as well to pursue them directly. That means most people won't do them or won't do them as consistently.

An example is exercise. Everyone got enough when there was no option except to walk everywhere. Now it's an option, so people are much less healthy due to lack of exercise.

I went to a bar last week, it was like a sports bar except the TV screens were hooked up to consoles and the patrons were playing Mario cart etc, with more dedicated spaces upstairs on a mezzanine including a few PCs

one of my favorite hangouts in my neighborhood is a barcade that hosts only indie cabinets

It's happening here, where I'm at (smallish city in the PNW). I've started going to a near-weekly board game meetup where we inevitably talk about more than games (computers, sometimes news of the day). It's not a large group but it's about the same size as the Linux/UNIX groups I participated in a few decades ago.

You basically don't attend the public sessions at events to learn things you couldn't learn otherwise. At least keynotes are almost always streamed and companies give out very little in the way of datasheets and other printed information which is all available online anyway.

Yeah, there are breakout sessions, and they're a good way to have some focused time on something you're interested in. But anyone who regularly goes to conferences will tell you it's mostly about the hallway track.

I think it's trending that way, but there are still going to be niche interest groups where you're almost certainly not going to have enough other members in your geographic vicinity to have in-person meetings. In the 1990s if you lived in a 10,000 person town you'd be lucky to find 4 other people in your age group with such niche interests as, say, personal computers or video games. Obviously those two things are quite widespread now, but there are new things that are just as niche as those once were.

I lived near a town of less than 2000 in the 90s and there were a lot more than 4 people in my age group who played video games. I had four kids in my class who were into computers enough to reinstall Windows, set up networks, and swap ISA/AGP/PCI cards with each other. I lived near a bigger "city" of 30,000 that had swap-meets and 200 person LAN parties, though I think they might have only gotten 50 or 60 participants in the mid-90s.

Might have been different for different age groups though.

IRL events similar to E3 are still happening but worldwide and at a smaller scale. For example John Romero attended such an even in my insignificant EU country. It was awesome and not as expensive as E3 but of course much smaller so it couldn't cover as much as E3.

Totally not exhausted and please don't pepper that idea into HR's head.

If you need friends, feel free to do so outside of work. I'd be happy to meet up with you outside of work. Lots of folks in your area will.

But, let people who enjoy remote work continue to do so without trying to muck it up. Please.

There are still meetups of various sorts but I don't really disagree. The days of the Boston Computer Society having offices and renting out Symphony Hall to have Steve Jobs basically do a reprise of the NeXT launch are long gone.

This happened a lot. 2600 Magazine had locations for meet ups with ones fellow hackers. I, personally, wrote in and had them remove 2 locations, since people stopped showing up to them after the evolution of information we're in now.

Ironic, imo. It all started with BBSes, turned into personal meets, then went right back to digital, because of ease of use and features not supported with the BBS style of community.

I miss BBSes some days. It was a fun time.

I don't agree at all. The Video Game Awards from last week was critiqued for being mostly previews of upcoming games.

E3 was poorly managed.

> mostly previews of upcoming games

It's the reason 99% of the viewers watch it

How can you give an award to an upcoming game? By definition that game is not finished yet...

The awards are for games that have come out over the past year. But they're juxtaposed by trailers and announcements for new games that will release in the next year or two.

To be fair, it's really the inverse - it's a majority trailer/announcement showcase with some video game awards in the middle.

It really isn't though. The video game awards are pretty huge. It just wasn't managed well.

This is more a product of Sony & Microsoft not only buying all the studios but also then wanting to have their own showcases and not have compete with each other on stage.

To me this all kind of started back in E3 2013 when the PS4 & Xbox One were being unveiled.

The pandemic probably didn't ultimately change a lot of things as much as people thought it would early on. But there are certainly events that were stumbling along, mostly on momentum, that didn't make it to the other side.

It impacted E3 a bit more than some of the others because they were attempting to pivot from Vendor facing to public facing and compete against established Cons like Gamescon or PAX and the pandemic blew up any momentum they had. It was the interception of their hail mary to save the show.

Companies want to have as much control as possible over their own announcements.

It reminds me of how Apple left Macworld in favour of hosting its own events.

Or even (as you mention) abandoned live presentation altogether.

> Or even (as you mention) abandoned live presentation altogether.

The writing on the wall for this was when Steve Jobs died. Covid just gave them the nails.

There's just so much that can go wrong (elon musk throwing the ball at the cybertruck window and it cracks for ex).

Apple has so much in-house video production skill and so many more people want to watch Apple events than could possibly be accommodated in person. What's the point of jamming a crowd into the Yerba Buena Center or wherever when most people will be watching streaming anyway and you have so much more control over the results that way?

I feel the same way. The new Apple videos are supremely well-produced. Of course there's something special about the absolute best of those live presentations (Jobs' original iPhone announcement is an all-timer), but there are way more live presentations that are far from memorable.

I feel the opposite. I can't stand the slick recorded Apple launch videos. They feel very corporate and soulless. I bet they do an endless amount of takes.

I can't stand the all the CGI that started to occur after COVID. I want to go back to the old school presentations. Like one second you are seeing the Apple Park then next second it is flying 10 stories down into some secret sterile bunker out of a video game or something.

the low points of the live presentations are memorable too - like the iPod HiFi!

Watching it live just feels better. Go back and watch one where they do it live and one where it does it pre-recorded. Something just feels off with the pre-recorded one.

By live i mean they are doing the presentation on the spot, not live as in person BTW.

Jobs did have a penchant for making a live demo feel natural. With anyone else, it just doesn't feel the same. I much prefer the pre-recorded videos now.

Steve was great at it, but maybe all it takes is for the presenter to be passionate about the thing they are presenting.

Elon is a terrible live speaker and yet I think his keynotes are pretty good. Also, we've all made fun of Steve Ballmer, but he was good at this as well.

Meanwhile, listening to Tim or Sundar is much less captivating. Perhaps if Tim could do a presentation about optimizing supply chains he would do much better than when he's at presenting iPad games.

> Steve was great at it, but maybe all it takes is for the presenter to be passionate about the thing they are presenting.

I claim to be a (rather trivial) counterexample to this hypothesis. I do claim that I am quite passionate about things that I am presenting - but this does not make me a good presenter or speaker.

Cook is not really a natural. He makes up for it by throwing in a lot of incredibles and amazings and it often feels pretty forced.

>Elon is a terrible live speaker and yet I think his keynotes are pretty good.

Can you give a good example?

The Cyber truck unveil comes to mind as one of his worst, he clearly did not even look at the slides before going on stage as he says one thing and the slide has some completely different topic on it. If anything the glass break was the saving grace of the presentation. At least they got a meme out of it.

The Cyber truck delivery event was him stuttering over a couple videos making it up as he went along, then awkwardly handing over keys (its as if they didn't think about the flow of the vehicles coming on to and going off the stage) and then thats a wrap. Lets not talk about how he is always 30+ minutes late. Does this sound like a guy who gives even an ounce of care?

When the Model 3 delivery event occurred he was going through the breakup with Amber Heard so last second he ordered a switch to some bullshit song that he felt represented his relationship with Heard. I'm sure they have gone through a countless number of marketing people. Hell they had the guy that helped design Apple stores and even he left in 2013.

His presentations are a complete insult to the Jobs era presentations, hell they don't even come close to anything "Tim Apple"™ produces.

He always makes the excuse that "we are more concerned with making the best product so we dont waste time prepping for the presentation". Well Apple can make excellent polished products AND put consistent minimum effort into their presentations.

Ok I get it, its just a presentation for some capitalist company so what?

There was an old philosophy that Jobs used to talk about in his biography about how the truly passionate craft maker takes enormous pains to ensure that when making an item, it is made with beauty and care both outside where everyone can see but also both inside where no one will ever look. Think of the company itself as an item, Apple definitely still has this mentality, just look at how components are laid out in their product teardowns. Look at how they try to polish everything about the company brand, image, store designs specific to each city etc. I admire this thinking and try to aspire to it in my life but Musk is a complete insult to that type of thinking.

It really was an event for the magazine era. As they lost importance, and easily showing video became possible, it was on borrowed time.

I remember when different magazines would get different exclusive screenshots for the PS2's Spiderman 2, and I would log in every single day to a BBS forum in the internet cafe to see if someone had uploaded the screenshot.

Virtually nobody was using BBS's during the PS2 era. That was just a forum.

They could have adapted to the modern era instead of getting wiped out.

Is gaming big among tech people and software engineers?

I did (while 18 and younger) play video games for most days of my life, with it being the main thing I did on holidays and also after school on school days, but I kind of lost interest for the most part after I turned 19 (not looking down on others who play them at all).

I remember my university (for tech fields like CS) had a room for LAN parties and also had a Discord (mostly a gaming-related chat platform?) set up by one lecturer for informal chat.

I'm not entirely sure what relationship our industry (most here are coders in some capacity?) has with gaming and would like to see others' thoughts.

Assuming this question is asked in good faith. I find it hard to believe you could work in the tech industry and not realize that a lot of your co-workers probably play games. Unless you're just the type who doesn't ever speak to people.

I'ved worked in tech for 20+ years at this point and every tech company I've worked at had gamers across all departments but usually programmers/engineers have a much higher percentage of being gamers. Every tech company I've worked at has some area with consoles hooked up to TVs for playing Fifa or Mario Kart type multiplayer games. Most of those companies also had one or two arcade machines too. And then every company has some internal groups/communities for gamers. Even the most serious and least "gamey" of the companies I worked for (a financial tech company) had internal communities for Dota 2 and Valorant...

I would go further and state that many probably owe gaming for their tech career. In the dark ages, installing and running a game could take significant technical effort. Scouring forums and looking for magical configuration or patches that could make it work. That technical knowledge builds upon itself.

when games were far more open to supporting mods and had big communities around it, its where I first cut my teeth programming in earnest without even realizing it.

At some point, the programming became more fun than the playing for me

now kids are modding roblox and minecraft

It’s actually really cool (to me) the irony that both of these games are over a decade old — ancient in the computing timeframe, I would argue — and so widely appealing to all age ranges.

Roblox released in 2006 [0]

Minecraft officially was released in 2011, with a public testing release in 2009 [1]

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft

My programming journey started in like 2013ish with making guns on roblox which eventually turned into working on Minecraft mods.

Agree! What got me into programming was building/running my own Counter-Strike server and corresponding stats website. Now with companies running their own servers internally, that isn't nearly as common.

I'm old enough to remember trying to get IRQs and DMAs set, and trying to figure out whether I should use Tandy or EGA mode.

Some even disassembled their games to modify them ;)

I work in startups, and literally not a single one of my coworkers plays games. Maybe it depends a lot on your field or company?

As an anecdote that is completely contrary to yours. I also recently worked in startups (within the last year), and practically single person in the founding team I worked alongside was an avid gamer.

I think the proportion of gamers in the tech sphere vs others is likely overall higher than the norm. I do honestly find it hard to believe others don't think gaming is common in tech.

On my current team in a definitely non-startup corporate-y atmosphere, even many of the devs well into their 40s and above are avid gamers to this day. Meanwhile I'm 30 and while I don't play very often anymore I definitely was one as a teen into my early 20's.

I'm disappointed there was any doubt that my question was asked in good faith! I do regret the obsession I had with video games when younger because of the huge time sink I put in, but I only see that as a me-problem (others likely have a healthier relationship with it).

Thanks for sharing your experience though. That's interesting news to me. I talk with coworkers occassionally, but games don't come up (and neither do other interests outside of work).

> I do regret the obsession I had with video games when younger because of the huge time sink I put in

Don't regret time spent doing something you enjoy. So as long as you enjoyed it, feel good about it.

> Don't regret time spent doing something you enjoy.

This common saying is harmful and borderline hedonistic. Not all enjoyable activities are good activities. Should ex-smokers not regret their past smoking habit, then?

Everything must be in moderation. Playing video games, watching movies, and binging TV shows are great for unwinding after work. But if you do them too much, they can disrupt your life.

Yes, ex-smokers should not regret their past smoking habits. There is no point in letting past decisions affect your present emotions.

Are you suggesting that we should never regret anything, then?

Like I said, everything must be in moderation. Regrets are effective for reminding us not to repeat the same mistakes. But of course if we regret our mistakes 24/7, it will only depress us and discourage us to do anything.

Yes we should not regret anything. Regret is not effective for reminding us not to repeat mistakes ( the experience of the mistake is enough to do that, and not the same as regret)

You have a different definition of "regret" from what most people think, then.

Nerd alert.

Opportunity cost is real.

Opportunity cost is definitely one thing I had in mind. Other than that, my peers were committed to various things like fundraising for charitable organisations, doing something good by serving people in one way or another, voluntarily taking up responsibilities or just becoming a more well-rounded person by spending their time doing various things instead of just one thing.

While they all did that, I just stayed at home playing games instead and acted like the sole purpose of life was to enjoy myself which is something worth regretting (and happy I've made some progress since then).

It's not. Every instant of your life you're making choices that lock you out of opportunities. To claim that you're able to measure the opportunity cost of your current path is to claim that you're able to know the path that would have led to the greatest reward and measure that reward. At best you could say that in hindsight a previous choice you made was suboptimal.

Try to not do this to yourself too much. Everybody needs an outlet, and you can't beat yourself up for spending time relaxing or enjoying instead of hustling with a side gig or something.

I’m not beating myself up. I’m consciously choosing to engage in productive and enriching hobbies, while refusing to rationalize away those that are time wasting.

I don't consider playing video games time wasting. If they were, then watching movies is time wasting, enjoying art is time wasting, playing board games or sports with friends is time wasting.

Certainly, an addiction to gaming is bad, as is playing games too much to the detriment of the rest of your life. Ultimately, everyone should do what they find enjoyable in the moment that they will simultaneously not regret later in life. Totally understand if video games fall under that category for you, but I dispute them as "time wasting" as a general statement.

All activities are inherently "time wasting". After you're gone and dust - it's not like you'll be regretting playing the latest release of FORZA versus taking yet another Rosetta Stone course...

What are those hobbies?

Reading non-fiction, writing open-source software, taking continuing education classes at my local university, learning foreign languages, self-study, volunteering, travel.

That's cool! I do all of those things as well, minus the uni classes and open-source. But for someone who has no interest in travel, then learning foreign languages would be a waste of time. I personally consider writing open-source software a waste of my time because it would be taking away from my closed-source side project ventures.

You can totally min/max your entire life and only do things for self-improvement, but then to what end? What do you expect to derive out of the continuing education classes that is going to be significantly valuable to your life/career?

I think it's important to note that many people are actually quite satisfied with their position in life, a lot of us are making a lot of money engaging in interesting work, so at a certain point doing things for the sake of minimizing opportunity cost comes with diminishing returns as you've already made the most of the opportunities you've already had. The whole point of working hard is to reach some stage of life where you can actually reap the rewards and have the time and resources to enjoy yourself however you please without worrying about it.

I don’t really use my language learning for travel—nearly everyone speaks better English than I do their native language.

But in the same way that learning Haskell or Lisp can change the way you write and think about code, learning a language like Japanese can fundamentally change the way you think about everything. There’s intrinsic value to being multilingual.

Of greater pragmatic benefit is that if you learn a language, like Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, or French, you gain exposure to a whole different media landscape, including information on news and world events that is drastically different from what you encounter in the anglosphere.

What makes any of those things more or less valuable than playing a video game?

Volunteering, sure, but the rest are just as self indulgent as any other pass time. Just because you value them higher doesn't mean you should discount the things that other people do to enjoy themselves.

In our intensely competitive capitalist society, gaming has a low expected utility. It also doesn't usually reinforce skills that make you more employable. You also usually don't get a salary or remuneration.

The elitist in me wants to say games are little more than hi-res Skinner boxes. But properly applied, games can teach us strategy, reason, and problem solving. Is that why I play God of War? No. I play it because KRATOS SMASH

All of those activities enrich my life and help me grow as an individual. I think someone should always be learning throughout their life, and I have yet to see a video game that accomplishes that.

Yes, gaming is big among people who work in tech (software engineers, sysadmins, etc). It's uncommon to be working in tech and not be a gamer, in my experience. Not unheard of by any means, but not the majority either.

I was a huge console gamer in my teens, then transitioned into a PC gamer in my young adult years (helped by the yo-ho attitude of the era), then became aware of the scene and have pretty much treated any AAA title as guaranteed spyware trash until it gets cracked and (fitgirl) repacked.

I play maybe a game a year, where I basically do not sleep for a week, use/develop trainers to get past the grind-ey aspects of the gameplay, and essentially finish the game for the plot, as fast as possible so that I can resume my normal work life of unpaid overtime.

I keep up with interesting games by watching good youtubers like Jacob Gellar[0], but essentially I don't really play any small indie games, with the exception of Dwarf Fortress... though I mostly just like to read the colourful dev blog[1] instead of playing it.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMGEjgYJhEc

1: https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html

I've worked in tech for a number of years. I think I'm in the same boat as you. However, I can confidentially say that videogames were merely a conduit to social experiences with friends. i.e. you wouldn't find me grinding a game by myself just for the sake of getting good. For my friend group, that was consoles in our teens, and PC in our early 20s.

I've mostly given up on traditional PC gaming. I have a Nintendo Switch and a Steam Deck. I use the Deck occasionally to play games that aren't available on Switch, but otherwise the Switch is preferred, because it enables social interactions so easily.

Now that I'm reaching mid-life, I cringe at the thought of taking time off work to play a game. If it means that much to you, more power to you. Apparently I've separated from the hardcore gamer scene.

To add a datapoint, I also gamed a lot (18 and younger) but quit when I started my SWE career some 15 years ago. Have not had a desire to play since then.

I probably played mostly though never voraciously in my 20s--I was never really much of a console gamer and PCs didn't really exist earlier to any great degree. I sometimes still dabble--like I was into the Wii sports games for a while--but I basically grew out of it more than not. I think that's a pretty common pattern for a lot of people. What I do still play is mostly on mobile when I travel.

I find a lot of millennial devs like me are old, have responsibilities, kids, a family, barely have time to game.

I bought a PS5, only own one game and I barely play with it. I just have either no time or little energy to play. I wanna get Spider-man 2, but I know I'd just end up not playing it.

Now the Nintendo Switch is another thing. I still play it quite a bit, especially the Zelda game. It's just so easy and convenient to pick up anywhere anytime.

It boots up quickly and it's just so convenient.

And that's it. That's life for a lot of us, squeezing in gaming here and there whenever there's time, whenever the wife gives the go ahead or whenever you've tackled your day-to-day responsibilities.

As a millenial devs with kids, the switch is really the only reason I game for what you mentioned. Quick, easy and convenient. Also, my son is of the age of playing video games (7) and the switch just has good games to play two player with him on. (Time honored tradition of kicking the kids butt in Mario Kart).

My main concern with games is avoiding the gambling. My kids are not old enough to video game on a console yet, so they just play some educational iOS game or maybe some from Apple Arcade.

I used to play games on Xbox like Modern Warfare 2 and Halo, but I lost all interest many years ago. The games got too complicated, and as I understand, now you have to pay for more and more add ons. It all seems very complicated.

Oh yea, that is another thing I enjoy about the Nintendo ecosystem. I have co-workers who are single and still game a lot and the whole paying for add-ons to be competitive, or to get a feeling of completeness about a game and what not is something I really enjoy about the Nintendo ecosystem. Sure Nintendo games can have DLCs, but I've not met one yet where I felt like the DLCs were required to make the game feel complete or to be competitive (like map packs on Call of Duty). You can play BoTW without the DLC and still have a really good time, also really re-playable.

Edit: Sure, Map packs weren't required. But it was shitty when all your friends had the map packs and wanted to play the new maps online and you didn't have them.

But yea, I really hate the gambling aspects some of the big AAA studios have adopted.

It depends on the age I think. I used to play a lot of games but as I've gotten older I've found myself with less time. I've also noticed my reflexes have gotten a lot worse, I'm in my late 30's I struggle with some multiplayer games like Counterstrike or Dota those competitive multiplayer games are no longer fun for me anymore.

I still like to chill out with a good single player game from time to time like Civilization or Total War series. I enjoyed Baldur's Gate 3 when it came out earlier this year.

I'd say gaming went from something I did often in my early 20's to occasionally by the time I was in my 30's.

The replies to this comment surprise me a bit. I'm in a similar situation as you. I used to play video games all the time as a teenager. When I went to university, I stopped playing at all. In hindsight, it was a mix of inconvenience (I wouldn't dare to bring a desktop to a tiny dorm, and good luck playing on a laptop!) and the fact that I wanted to try many things that were new to me at the time. Even then, I still lack motivation to try downloading and play a game. None of my coworkers seem to play games regularly either. There are plenty of social activities one can do that isn't gaming.

>None of my coworkers seem to play games regularly either.

Are you sure? Since you don't game, I imagine you normally don't ask people what they've been playing lately. Just because they don't bring it (or don't bring it up when you're around) doesn't mean they don't play games when they're alone.

>There are plenty of social activities one can do that isn't gaming.

What a strange thing to say, especially since I can replace the last word with just about anything and the idea remains equally true. Are you saying to you an activity has no significance or importance (or at least not enough) if it doesn't have a social component? I'm not trying to be combative, just trying to understand your point of view.

I'm similar. The ability to socialize and party at-will eclipsed my desire to game.

I gamed a lot as a kid and much less as an adult, though it took a bit longer for me to put it down than you did. I'd say that video games are what got me into computers; I wanted to be a game developer as a child. I never really took to straight software development though; I'm more of a devops type these days, and I'm frankly a bit glad to have avoided the gaming industry because I'm not particularly happy with what it seems to have largely become. That said, there are still some smaller studios doing impressive, innovative work and it's very cool to see that.

I would feel very confident saying that the percentage of gamers is higher among tech people than people in general. It's easy to point to pretty direct relationships with tech and gaming - and with overlapping cultures.

It is. Some games I completed in the last few years: Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon, Mass Effect series, Max Payne, Deus Ex, Alan Wake...

My 30-40ish friends and colleges also play casually or actively and they are in tech.

I found my interest in video games died when I started working. Whatever button in my brain video games were pushing is now being pushed by the day job and I get paid for it.

I'm curious, if you don't mind me asking what field of work are you in?

You know, shooting demons, solving mysteries, jumping over koopas, that kind of thing…

My company is hiring, we’re looking for a rockstar koopa jumper

A x10 koopa jumper can not only get the work of ten other employees done, but encourage good planning and future building for better koopa jumping in the future, whereas ten bad koopa jumpers will not only jump very few koopas, but also burn bridges and create koopa jumping debt that will sink the company.

unsurprisingly, challenging jobs have all the hallmarks of a challenging game, requiring skills for logistics, resource and project/timeline management, meta-analytical skills to break-the-beta, curious mind to dig further.

Oh yes, and rockstar koopa jumping skills too (drats, so thats what my current job is lacking).

There are a lot of tech people and programmers in the game industry and in game-industry-adjacent industries (like mocap, lidar, etc), especially around LA. A lot of that work is somewhat thankless, but getting industry-only passes to E3 was a one of the few cool perks, especially back when E3 was off-the-walls with porn stars and insane swag.

I'm surprised this has been asked. The majority of sw engineers I have worked with over the past 20+ years have been gamers. I'd prepared to go out on a limb and say the most effective and productive people I have worked with have tended to have been the biggest gamers.

I'd say gaming is similar to sports in that it's an easy way to find common ground with other men when speaking casually, at least in my Zoomer cohort.

The Video Game History Foundation uploaded an archive of E3 2000 show floor footage last week. It's quite the time capsule. The cleverly deceptive MGS2 trailer is in it! Also many things "best left in 2000".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SekM6yD26Qc

E3 2000 had one of the greatest trailers ever made for a game that would never be released:

Halo.

The e3 2000 trailer was when it was under development as a PC title, prior to the buy out of Bungie by Microsoft, after which (?) it became an xbox exclusive.

> a game that would never be released

Halo was released to Xbox in 2001 and by 2003 both a MacOS and Windows port were released. "Delayed" maybe, but definitely not "never released".

I played quite a bit of Halo on PC in high school with my friends, sneaking into a nearby university computer lab and usurping it as a LAN party room. For some reason those Windows machines all had Halo pre-installed on them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo:_Combat_Evolved

It was not the same game as the PC version they initially were making though.

Believe it or not - it was actually meant to be an exclusive for Mac before Microsoft acquired it. Here’s Steve Jobs kicking off the demo in 1999: https://youtu.be/6eZ2yvWl9nQ?feature=shared

https://archive.is/ECxZR

Sad news. I fondly, but vaguely, remember road tripping from Pennsylvania to Atlanta in 1997 with a bunch of university buddies and other Doom/Quake addicts we connected with online. Someone in the group knew someone who knew someone and somehow we all found ourselves with "press" badges. If I recall correctly, that gave us access to some shit not available to the general public. I don't know, it was almost 30 years ago. 3DFX and Tomb Raider were everywhere. Fun times in a simpler less-immediately connected world.

Ah man, I remember that one specifically! I grew up around there and begged my parents to take me. They were probably gonna do it too but then my little brother was born right around that time.

Looking back, I'm not even sure we could've gotten in but that was a DREAM for a kid back then.

Yup. At the time there was a local video game program aimed at kids that one year ran a contest where the prize was a trip to that year's E3. It was like the Disneyland of video games.

Makes sense - the gaming industry, like Hollywood, has gone full monetization. A lot of the stuff is generic.

Why attend? Many AAA games are basically just rehashes.

Indeed. I think it is even tempting to suggest video gaming may be in trouble, after a multi decade long technology advancement enabled cambrian explosion of possibilities, now it has settled into the narrowest field ever seen.

The last time it was remotely like this was the brown first person shooter phase circa 2005, but yet another walkfest with super high production values is no more interesting. If you happen to be into that stuff it is a golden age, but that is like saying the Marvel era of cinematic domination was a great thing.

The question really becomes if games were ever interesting to the mass market as games at all, or merely proxies for technological experimentation or storytelling, both of which can be done by other means.

> now it has settled into the narrowest field ever seen.

Funny, I just played a game where you carry worlds within worlds and leap between them. And that's the tip of the iceberg of the games coming out these days. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1497440/COCOON/

Interestingly, the video game industry has regularly grossed more than both the movie industry and the music industry combined[0][1] since at least 2019.

I can't seem to find the relevant article, but esports is now topping viewership of other sporting events (e.g. the SuperBowl). I'm sure eventually, there will be monteization models that follow and it will inevitably be grossing more too.

If anything, it seems like video games are still on the upward trend, and the narrowing is somewhat natural to the maturity of the industry. AAA titles need to gross alot to be profitable, and they stick to well traveled areas most of the time, however one thing I have observed that the video game industry has that the movie industry is lacking is a far more flourishing indie side to the industry[2], such as Yact Club Games or the folks behind Undertale

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46746593

[1]: Mind you, the BBC article is from 2019, you can search for current year and get even wider gaps between the video game industry and the movie / music industry

[2]: With a proper addendum here, that its still, like acting in a movie, ridiculously hard to make it as a indie developer. Still, there is a flourishing of indie game developers

Thinking about the difference in scale and scope between a AAA 3D HD real-time shootfest and a small 2d Visual Novel, I wonder if the problem with Indie movies is that we don't consider things like Youtube videos et al to qualify.

> now it has settled into the narrowest field ever seen.

That's a hot take. It's never been a better time to be a gamer. In addition to most of the gaming backlog being available via emulation, it's never been easier for a small number of people to build a great game. So long as you're not extremely picky there's more good games to play than time to play them.

Eh, I'd put an asterisk on the "never been easier for a small number of people to build a great game" comment. On one hand, what can be achieved by an individual with today's engines is indisputably incredible relative to what was possible in the past. On the other hand, expectations from players have also had a pretty huge runaway explosion as well, meaning the ability for a small team to achieve commercial success is more of a mixed bag.

It obviously still happens. Lethal Company is a great example of that (1 developer, currently the top seller on Steam), but compared to the DOOM/Myst/etc era where ALL games were developed by small teams it's harder to establish a niche.

No, the problem is not expectations. There's a viable market for pretty much anything. The problem small developers face is not so much finding a market, but rather being able to be seen. Since it's so easy to make games nowadays, the indy market is flooded with titles. If you go browsing through Steam it's not too hard to find games that will appeal to you, but that you just never heard of. If the AAA studios are analogous to Hollywood, then the indy studios are analogous to YouTubers.

of course it is, but the industrialisation of games seems inevitable. You had craft workshops then, with 10-30 people, now you have factories like Ubisoft making yearly releases of whatever game they can (Assassins Creed, Far Cry, etc)

The fact that Steam exists and dominates the industry however, was not inevitable, and its incredible that we have things like Early Access and other tools to enable smaller developers to carve out their niche!

This is a particularly weird take for me this year, when I've been absolutely snowed under with good games to play. There are more high quality gaming hours available to me, just from this year, than I have available to play them. It's hard for me to remember a better year for gaming in the last quarter century, as far as new releases are concerned

It would be interesting for you to list titles, because I share the OP's sentiment that this year has been largely uninteresting for gaming. I've had exactly three games which I cared about: Like a Dragon Ishin, LaD Gaiden, and Baldur's Gate 3. Good games all, but not exactly a barn burning year.

Sure, here's some highlights from this year for me: Street Fighter 6, Sea of Stars, Ghost Song (technically late 2022, but I'm counting it), Super Mario Wonder, Octopath Traveler 2, Void Stranger, Oxenfree 2, Age of Empires 2 (on Xbox).

Thanks for that. Looking at that list, I wonder if the reason that I've felt underwhelmed is because of my backlog. For example I actually kind of forgot about Sea of Stars and OT 2 (both games I do want to play), because I have so many JRPGs in my backlog already that I can't throw more onto the pile.

If by "backlog" you are referring to the mere brute fact that you have a bunch of games you haven't played, fine.

If by "backlog" your mental model includes even a hint of obligation... drop it. You have no obligation to games. You have no obligation to play them, you have no obligation to finish them if you start. They're just sunk costs. If they happen to be what you want to do, great, but if what you really want to do tonight is drop $30 on some new (to you) game and go to town, all that is costing you is $30 and the relevant time. It is not costing you $30, the relevant time, and the moral failure of betraying your backlog, because the latter does not exist. It is not costing you any more because you "wasted" the money acquiring your backlog, because, again, it is sunk cost.

Yes, it's obvious when I say it, but if you're anything like me (and most other people I see) it takes a few very deliberative passes at training your subconscious to really get this.

The good news, breaking yourself of sunk cost fallacy can directly pay off in your job, too. It's a pernicious little mistake that can sneak up on you, and it's one of the things that divides the engineers from the business folk in your company... and I gotta tell you, even as an engineer and with all sympathy to engineers, the business folk are 100% in the right on this one.

(Additionally, once you really internalize this, you'll also find yourself less inclined to buy something just because it's on a killer deal. The marginal value of adding one more game to my list of games I can play in the future for $0 may not be even $1 once I've already got a couple dozen such great $0 choices.)

Agree with all this. One additional thing for me is I think it's fun to be playing a game while it's hot and part of "the conversation", rather than after everyone has moved on to something else and I'm just playing catchup. Just another point in favor of forgetting the concept of a backlog entirely.

Spider-man 2? Breath of the Wild 2?

They're not to my tastes, but if you're into them, then sure, yeah! Lots of good stuff this year.

The two big hits for me this year have been Baldur's Gate and Armored Core. Both are by devs with a good track record. But I can definitely see the argument that there is a lot of samey crap. Activision seems to be on an annual release cadence for Call of Duty now. Its already come full circle by remaking the modern warfare trilogy. Starfield was a disappointment, Bethesda seems stuck in 2003. There's the endless stream of sports titles which really should be their own category of entertainment. They are so divorced from the rest of the video game market.

Everyone seems to have forgotten Hogwarts: Legacy was this year too.

Maybe not to your taste, but over 15m copies sold, second highest single player game of all time on Steam after Cyberpunk and very strong reviews (89% aggregate on opencritic).

Yeah, same.

There have never been this many good games coming out in a year. There also is more Call of Duty and FIFA garbage than ever, but I haven't found it hard to simply ignore it?

I think The Game Awards is a good refutation of this argument. They showed off a ton of upcoming stuff, most of which wasn't just FIFA/CoD AAA shovelware. A good demonstration that you can advertise all the other stuff too.

I think the real argument is that E3 was industry captured, had become a mouthpiece for the giants, and it was time for it to go.

That's not why. E3 lost out to the big game publishers doing their own events. And so it lacked purpose. I also don't think it adjusted well to COVID.

The Game Awards has a similar but different format with a clearer purpose. And it is thriving and has largely replaced the games aspect of E3.

I disagree - the game awards is just as much if not even more promotion than E3.

Look at console sales, says it all.

If they aren't rehashes, they're broken, unfinished, or underwhelming. BG3 was a welcome anomaly. The norm in Generation 8 has been that AAA releases just plain suck, or are buggy.

Not really, The Game Awards just took over.

TGA is full-on monetization. This year's TGA spent more time on paid game previews and advertisements than it did on the awards. Hideo Kojima was given more time to preview his upcoming game than all of the winners' speeches combined.

The breakdown of the show:

1% announcing the nominees and winners

1% speeches by the winners

10% Hideo Kojima

10% other celebrities

78% ads and game previews

The award part is worst part of the game award and personally one of the reason I watch it is especially to see a Kojima premiere and I wasn't disappointed when he announced he was going to collaborate with Jordan Peele.

I mean, E3 was a business tradeshow. That's why people like me who never went have rose colored glasses, because we didn't see how dry it was, just the press show excitement leaked to us. It was retailers and publishers making shelf space deals and some annoucement press conferences. A lot of the industry cross pollenation was taken up by GDC for devs, and I'm not sure how it is these days but I went to Penny Arcade Expo in 2015 and it felt very much like the indies and fan conventions. Pandemic changed things, but I"m not sure how these expos are these days.

>Why attend? Many AAA games are basically just rehashes.

This is a very funny line given that E3 for the longest time was an industry-only conference, and they only started selling passed to general public the last two years of the event.

> has gone full monetization

What were they before, non-profit? The indy game scene is still going strong, what am I missing?

2023 was the best year for gaming in decades, what are you talking about?

The OP got old. Happens to all of us. Some accept it better than others.

I guess it depends on the kind of games you like or follow. For example, the Elder Scrolls last release, Skyrim (2011), has been milked and re-released seven times, the last one in 2021. Meanwhile the fans keep expecting an Elder Scrolls VI soon(TM).

There are good new games, but there is also a growing attitude in big game studios to low-risk cash in old franchises.

I mean, the studio you're referring to just launched a huge new IP this year. It wasn't very good, but you can't accuse Bethesda of "low-risk cash in" when they just released a brand new title this year.

So it does both, right? As I said, it depends on the kind of games you like or follow.

To each their own obviously, but look at the Game of the Year nominees - all sequels, and even a remaster.

Baldurs Gate is good, but it’s really not that much different than Divinity original sin.

Nothing is wrong with games being similar, same thing happened with movies. It’s just formulaic imo.

2005 was the year I noticed it was becoming irrelevant. I had traveled thousands of miles to stand in line to be the first to see new games, and while standing in those lines, friends back home would text me talking about the trailer they just watched on the internet.

All those friends were wishing they could play the game as you were about to, though. It's not like pre release demos were that big (yes magazines came with CDs, but those were rare as far as I remember).

> A mix of new competitors, partner withdrawals, changing audience habits and pandemic-era disruptions led to E3’s collapse, ending years of attempts to resuscitate the event, which began in 1995.

This poorly worded sentence can easily be read to state that the years of attempts to resuscitate E3 began in 1995.

The author is fairly well-versed about video games and I've known him online for a long time from a site called gamecritics. I'll allow that's a poorly worded sentence though.

Maybe they were trying to prove they weren't using ChatGPT.

...and phrase your results slightly awkwardly like a time pressured human journalist (churnalist) would.

At the end of the day, the big thing that killed it was that companies realised they didn't need a massive event in the middle of summer to advertise their games, and could run their own events year around. Stuff like Nintendo Directs, State of Plays and Xbox Game Showcases can be held at fairly short notice, are much cheaper than hiring out part of a hall and have less that can go wrong than a stage presentation would.

When the only news sources are magazines and physical media and the internet isn't as big of a deal, something like E3 makes sense. In the modern era of YouTube and Twitch and livestreams? Not so much.

Pre Covid the whole networking and meeting other developers and publishers aspect kept it going, but once everyone was locked in and events were cancelled, well it was basically just a more expensive Direct or something.

So sadly, it's no surprise it's finally died off.

RIP, booth dudes and booth babes.

Official end of the 90s era.

People rely deny the role of libido in that industry.

You could bring them back and have a totally enticing event.

Fortunately Miami exists and the west coast ideology of “inclusion by exclusion” is ignored.

Right from the beginning.

https://www.engadget.com/2016-12-29-sex-at-ces-an-uncomforta...

that was very insightful! sex industry relies on technology distribution and so didn’t exist as well without the latest tech and the interest from enthusiasts

easy to forget that

What on earth will the buff dude with a blonde flattop do now that he can no longer be Guile at game conventions?

TikTok, apparently.

Wait for Duke Nukem Forever to finally come out? /s

>The pandemic further exacerbated E3’s woes, as quarantines forced several game publishers to adopt the online news conference format, to varying degrees of success.

Jensen Huang's spectacular spatula collection has driven the barnstorming success of Nvidia's online news conferences.

https://twitter.com/NVIDIAGeForce/status/1304088143805607936

Of all the CEO's I've seen present, Jensen has been the best.

Charismatic engineer.

Very stupid, funny video from the last minutes of the last E3 in 2019 where this character Bugs Bunnys around trying to squeeze as much fun as possible out of the place while everyone's breaking down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsH0s2_S_Ck

That's not just any character... It's Tim Rogers, purveyor of fine six-hour game reviews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw

On the positive side, Gamescom has been on the rise for a while, together with other more local gaming events. It shows how the focus of a live event changed from bringing news, to providing entertainment to hundreds of thousands of cosplayers and fans. With maybe some "news" on the side, which then becomes available on Youtube 5 minutes after.

I always enjoyed watching videos of crowd reactions to trailers. It's a bummer we won't get those anymore, but I can see why it's too expensive to host an IRL event. I wonder why they didn't transition to an online-only expo? I'd watch that.

Why would you want to a release about your game at same time with all other games, if you didn't have to. You would instead try to guess a few days in year where there isn't likely other releases and aim for that. In later case you get more publicity for same effort.

E3, kinda makes sense for connections and getting boots on grounds and showing stuff in progress in controlled environment. But for online you are better off going alone, unless you are tiny.

This is more about back in its peak, but E3 used to gather all the gamer's attention to a single keynote, it was like the Super Bowl of gaming. Basically if your game was on stage/shown off well it would be covered by every single gaming press and magazine and almost guaranteed mainstream gaming culture hype.

Today Geoff Keighley's Video Game Awards basically took over that role and similarly is the single biggest stage/audience to announce a new game to. If you had a game that they were interested in revealing + you thought it would sparkle to its audience it's a powerful platform.

Why would a vendor pay someone else for an online-only expo when they can market directly via ads? Why would a customer pay to participate in an online-only expo when they can see videos for free online?

Marketing directly via ads is not free, either.

Most industries have trade and consumer shows (from film to boardgames to concrete). There's no reason to expect that gaming is somehow unique and should not have one. It's unlikely it will be like the E3 of decades past (or even have the name), but there's value to getting consumers to see/try a bunch of new games.

hmmm let's see E-sports influencer reach is I imagine the cause as many vendors are in fact using those for their ads reach, etc.

it's called summer games fest

And the crowd reactions are still there in the form of chat/Twitter. And then there's PAX et al.. It's not the same, but the experience isn't completely erased from existence.

I remember circa 2005 that E3 seemed to be on its last legs? Maybe it paused for a couple years. Particularly, in English class, there was some prompt (possibly involving time travel) where my answer was "It would be cool to go to E3 in 2020" or something like that, and the student teacher dude thought it was a cool idea and explained E3 to the class...

I haven't paid any attention to E3 since then, though! (I also just never tried to keep up with playing the latest games, either.)

I too thought E3 died decades ago, so I looked it up.

Turns out in ~2007 E3 decided they were a industry event for industry people, so they made it invitation-only and cut the attendance from 70,000 to 5,000

https://web.archive.org/web/20060811192744/http://arstechnic...

I'd love to see E3 in the future be a more community driven event with a focus on A/AA games. People still want to see and attend these events, and there's tons and tons of good games that get released every year that go unnoticed.

Sad to see. At its peak the dueling press conferences was enormously exciting and made for a week of high energy, "must see tv" type energy where you had to be there online in the moment to really experience it in the best way.

The era of "Megaton" announcements is long over at this point. Still there is the potential to be surprised by an announcement, but it'll be in some pre-recorded direct video with less instant response from journalists* or the competition.

* I mean sadly hand in hand with the death of E3 game journalism has been dying out for years and years too as print media died and the industry died.

It took a few years, but COVID has claimed its biggest victim yet.

In the era of livestreams and corporate events, it had nowhere to go. ReedPop and the ESA could have tried numerous times to get consumer engagement up, by maybe offering demos of what was on the showfloor. But that never happened.

Hopefully smaller events like Gamescom, Paris Games Week, Siegecon, etc take time to look at where E3 failed, and aim to improve engagement with the consumer base. Of which to me, at least, feels a bit aimless due to the sorry state of games released in Generation 8.

I think E3 was on its way out regardless. Nintendo dropped out of E3 years before COVID even happened. I attended a few years and it seemed like the bigger publishers such as Activision kept downsizing their presence at the event. COVID accelerated things for sure, but I imagine the end result would be the same.

> Hopefully smaller events like Gamescom, Paris Games Week, Siegecon

Are these really smaller? At least two of those had attendance numbers dwarfing E3, and Gamescom usually has around twice the amount of exhibitors.

Now from what I know, E3 used to be a more exclusive event limited to the press, making for a bigger news cycle. It was the place to show off your pre-rendered "gameplay" trailer and make announcements.

Important? Yes. Probably. Big? Not really.

Very sad. I remember watching coverage of the events when I was a kid on G4 TV (video game TV channel!) and being so excited to see all the new trailers. I would have friends come over and we would eat pizza and watch it all.

Now everything is instant on YouTube or whatever, but that magical excitement is gone. The sense of community is gone too.

Seeing the announcement of the Wii and waiting in line at Wal-Mart overnight for the release, cash in pocket.

Good times. Hope we find that magical excitement again one day.

We're in an industry with tons of trade conferences and sponsorships drive a lot of ROI. For us the value of the conference is really a marketplace; a place to meet customers and a place for customers to meet vendors (b2b).

I guess big conferences for consumer business make less sense; conferences-as-PR. It's not like Sony sales are going to be meaningful by meeting people directly at the conference.

Great in the "golden age" of gaming aka the 90s or early 2000s ( debatable but not much :) )

A lot of great things and also sins were committed, but realistically by the mid-00's the World wasn't the same and the Internet as a medium of news and promotion took over ( for the better and for the worse )

E3 should have ended in ~2010, so.. good riddance. ( in a friendly way )

No surprise. The big platforms, Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo, have a lot of studios under them now that they all have decided it was better just to do their own yearly show.

And now there are quite a bit of similar showcases for indie and PC games that it probably not worth spending the time and money making a big show like E3 was.

Do people really go to video game shows? I mean, seriously.

I can understand conferences for books/tv shows, as you can discuss the story etc with other people, ask the writers about next books/shows etc.

does gaming lend itself to that? I wouldn't think so. But I am an old fart in my 40s so :shrug:

The video game industry is larger than the Film, Music, Book, or TV industries. It's hugely popular with passionate fans, I would say yes.

Good. VGA should also die ASAP and will eventually.

The Audience stays the same, but the Show changed. E3 was a trade show for developers, actual journalists, and the gamurz. Journalists decided to make politics fashionable for the world of gaming and so it did.

E3 banned Booth Babes when their core audience was males. E3 tightened up on what was going on behind the doors with the groupies. Technology and games stopped being revolutionary or edge and now it's safe. No more actual gaming icons, we need celebrities and influencers.

This is the result of the mainstream industry adapting to SafeGaming only. SafeGaming isn't appealing to enthusiasts, just AAA gamers who continue to get taken for a ride.

VGA is going to die when their politics decide to change, leaving their current audience behind. Always happens.

This feels like the reason you'd like for E3 to have failed, but doesn't line up with the evidence. E3's attendance peaked in 2005, well before booth babes were banned and groupies were cracked down upon. It's decline started right as video streaming took off on the internet, and accelerated as companies like Activision and Sony began pulling out of the event, making it less and less relevant or useful.

Wow, I'm a game developer and I hated E3 for almost the exact opposite reason. Booth babes are gross and happy to see them go. Celebrities and influencers can fuck right off.

My first E3 opened my eyes to the disparity between the actual talent building the games 60 hours a week for $80k a year and money been thrown around for the publishing execs and marketing teams. The marketing budget wasn't being spent on carefully placed ads or thoughtful and creative campaigns, its blown on massive parties for the leaches and vampires.

RIP. An important part of the gaming history is now gone, such a shame.

Eh, all good things eventually come to an end. E3 played an important part of gaming history, but we're not worse off given that it died because gaming culture became extraordinarily mainstream and no longer required these kinds of industry marketing events.

I think app stores killed E3. There's no need to build hype around your game, just pay Nintendo or Sony to feature it on the home screen - people will buy it.

Perhaps their audience of gamers wanted it to be about games? Certainly not influencers, "high profile celebrity activations" and other assorted bullshit.

Non paywalled article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/12/how-the-internet-kill...

Well, at least we still have Tokyo Game Show.

I heard that it was disastrous last year because of the heat in Tokyo. I hope it isn't killed by the climate change :-/

I went there once in my twenties and it was fun although exhausting. So many people, so long lines, but you can play "that" game.

it's hard for new gamers to get into a new game when developers are following the marvel universe concept where everything needs to have a backstory and you need to watch prequels/sequels to fully enjoy things. ultimately they are pandering only to their die-hard fans who will churn with time

CES next?

CES still exists? With actual people going there?

Yeah man. It's the hot place to go when you need to find out what they managed to cram a wifi antenna and touchscreen with an unsecured OS into next. Definitely only sunshine & lollipops on the horizon for that event.

Lost, thank you for my early morning chuckle.

CES will continue to exist for as long as it's booked on back to back weeks with AVN AEE.

The show did much better when they were run concurrently though.

go woke go broke.

Sad. Never got to go.

again?

think of it like a horror movie franchise. soon, we'll have spin offs like CES vs E3: The revenge!!!

Kinda sad for nostalgic reasons, as I haven't actually been excited about E3 in the past 10 years or so.

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