The yearly Electronics Entertainment Expo, known as “E3” will be taking place from June 13th through the 15th, 2017. As usual, the gaming community, both average gamers and the games media, are getting excited to see what Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and the dozens of major 3rd party game publishers will be showing off.
As the title of the article suggests, I, for one, am not excited. At all.
Oh yes, I will be covering some of the gaming news I feel is worth mentioning, and yes, I certainly will be happy to hear news on some game series, or new hardware like the Scorpio, but all in all, the super-hyper “OH MY GOD IT’S TIME FOR E3” feeling that many have this time of year simply doesn’t exist in me.
Here’s the reason: It’s just going to be the same old junk, with new names and numbers.
We already know some of the games coming this next year: FarCry 5, Call of Duty WW2 being some major ones. I have a feeling there may be a new Assassins Creed game as they have taken a short break from the series over the past year or two to keep things fresh. We probably won’t have anything new on the Halo front as Halo 5 was released last year, but who knows, could be a side game in the works to coincide with Scorpio.
Random Xbox One controller to break up the text.
On that note, Microsoft is already hyping up the Scorpio in their own videos on their YouTube channel, which is cool, but in a way kind of shows a key problem with E3: It’s not necessary, and yet it still thrives.
E3 is a trade show, a holdover from the pre-internet days when companies had to find a way to show off all their new projects. Much like Comdex before it, E3, being basically a gaming oriented logical spinoff from Comdex, served as a way for the major players in the industry to really build enthusiasm for what’s to come, and it did well for that, up until the point where the Internet became ubiquitous. Virtually everyone has access to it in some form and as such can get the latest information on gaming, or whatever, instantly.
The Nintendo Switch announcement earlier in the year and how it went is proof enough of that.
There is simply no need for an event like this, and even if it didn’t happen, we would still have these games coming out, and still be able to learn about them – it’s pretty much a leftover from the “good old days” of gaming in the 90’s, a holdover that just feels out of place to me.
Random PS4 to break up the text.
I mean really, gaming isn’t changing much year to year, and the only “major” announcements that aren’t the same old thing being resold to us, or something new that will pump us for money in microtransactions, is flash im the pan / flavor of the week technology like Virtual Reality (which they have been pushing as the “new thing” in gaming for over 30 years now, or back the past decade motion controls, which never took off because, like I was saying a decade ago with the Wii, motion controls as the main way to play a game are just plain terrible in most cases.
What I’m getting at is, there just isn’t anything special about it: It’s forced to be this thing when it could honestly go away and the gaming industry would still do a fine job getting information out on their products. They have YouTube, they have zealous fanbases (who will always claim some company “won” or “killed it” at E3, for some damned reason), and they all have the advertising power to ensure everyone knows what they are up to.
E3 2005 was about the last time I think E3 was really a “needed” thing – that was the year the Xbox 360 was first shown and later released.
E3 is just an excuse to force a hype culture for the upcoming years things, and while that may, probably, help companies make even more money from pre-orders and the like, I see it as just kind of a waste: the money spent on E3 could be put into making games, and the systems we play them on, better.
That’s just my take on it though. I’ll still be covering it, like I did last year – in bits and pieces for what matters to me.
Catch you on the flip side.