I feel myself having to say this point blank every single year. The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, commonly known as E3, is a trade show. It is not some kind of contest. There are no “winners” or “losers” at the event, it is simply a trade show, just as much as CES is for general technology, or various other trade shows which happen every year are for pretty much any product class you can think of.
These events exist for the press that cover these topics, and for investors – E3 being as fan oriented as it is is more of a side effect of the nature of gaming more than anything else – gaming is an entertainment industry after all, and companies owe it to themselves to give the fans what they want, which is generally trailer after trailer for new games, and information on any new technology coming down the pipe in the next year or two.
The E3 Logo, presented here to break text. Enjoy!
This naturally spawns debate among the fans as to who “won” E3. I see it every year, and every year it gets more and more idiotic. As you can imagine, it follows the usual biases of what the given fan having this argument already likes (what a surprise) but beyond that, the ways with which fans defend companies and announcements, grasping at the most banal of reasons to express why Sony, Microsoft, or whomever “killed it” at E3 each year (I hate that phrase more than you can imagine, by the way.)
This is all pointless bickering, and another source for the making of clickbait video after clickbait video on YouTube (seriously, look at it all). As I said, E3 is a trade show. It isn’t American Idol or whatever contest show is popular now where you phone in or click on some poll online and some company is crowned the winner of E3 and that company gets to display some “winner of E3 2018” badge on all their game consoles or game boxes.
Nope. It’s not this at all. The most E3 serves in the public sector is for hype generation, and to instigate these arguments among gamers so that people are made painfully aware of what’s coming in the next year, all with the hopes that maybe a few people who normally wouldn’t buy a given game will buy it. That’s it. Otherwise, E3 is actually rather obsolete, but that’s another article to come.
E3 is a trade show. It’s a demonstration. That’s it. The real competition is in actual sales of units and brand recognition in popular consciousness, not in the actual event itself.
Stop fucking treating E3 like it’s anything more than what it is, a fucking trade show.