Every year I try to get my self excited about watching the gaming summer shows , what use to be E3. This year honestly I just couldn’t. I tried watching a few minutes of both the Sony and Summer Games fest and felt bored. I’m sure a lot of these games these they show will be great. But the way the present most of them honestly doesn’t engage me in the slightest.
Sometimes you get a cinematic trailer that shows no gameplay sometimes (mostimes) you get just gameplay with no context.
I feel like the presentation format doesn’t work for games not anymore anyway. I feel like just setting up a YouTube channel or a playlist with game logos , descriptions and back stories with a small trailer would work so much better.
Unlike E3 this SGF is a Geoff cash grab where most larger companies seldom take part. Outside of new hardware I don’t see the need for this no context trailer barrage.
Maybe I’m just out of touch maybe I’m just insane. Thoughts ?
Edit :: people seem to be getting stuck on the title (which I’ve updated). I’m not saying all game reveals are bad. There have been some genuine gems. In some cases those gems were not the actual game. But it got the job done. This is my commentary on how I see the modern gaming marketing landscape.
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My pet hate was always trailers not showing gameplay
story reveal
Nah
cinematic trailer
Nope
not ingame footage
No thanks.
Its like a trailer for a movie but its just someone on screen describing what it looks like
Persona 6 “trailer”:
30 Seconds of ambient sounds while some guy speaks the most generic words
5 seconds of some random gameplay footage that’s not telling me much
The crowd goes wild(?)
Only to see that game release pushed back 5 times before being cancelled.
Call me when the game’s ready, until then, good luck with the development!
Do you remember what E3 presentations used to be? Go back to 2006 and watch one straight through. Or even 2016. Lots of slides about how great the presenter’s company was, live demos that didn’t work; for about 2 hours that felt like 4, with far fewer games shown in the same amount of time as today. That’s not to say this is objectively better, or that it’s always good, but it’s how we arrived here. Compared to 20 years ago, I also have so many different ways to cut advertisements out of my life entirely that this and the Game Awards are basically the only times I seek them out. And it’s not just Geoff’s show; take a look at the Steam “showcase of showcases” page, and you’ll see all of the other little events tied around this time of year, too, often with demos available for us to play.
I do remember and I’m also definitely not going to say those were better days. I just think given what we can do now I believe most of the current formats could do with some change. I like Steam NextFest I think some alterations there even for just more trailers could be a truly special experience.
Just can’t over do it with crap like NextFest can do at times …
Oh the 2006 Sony E3 presentation! So many great memes came out of that one. Giant Enemy Crab!
Back in the day, you were lucky to get box art and screenshots! 😉
But, yeah, I get it. So much of it is just plainly manufactured bullshit. You can’t trust anything. Not at least since the Halo 2 debacle.
And even if it is real, there’s no guarantee it won’t change before release (cough - Watch Dogs - cough), get delayed forever, or just get outright cancelled and shelved.
Back in those days you had limits on physical pages / dial up on the web.
So you’d only see the biggest / most fleshed out (most of the time )
A little later but before broadband was ubiquitous to the internet there were cable shows that covered games and E3 like XPlay on TechTV.
Oh staying up late to watch the latest X-play episode. Such fond memories.
Compared to what though? Game reveals have always been big CGI trailer and maybe some tease of gameplay. If anything this year was way better than the last few because they showed back-to-back trailers and not have someone talk on stage for 5 minutes after each one.
Unlike E3 this SGF is a Geoff cash grab
You have a very rose tinted view of E3.
RTGame on YouTube is doing 20th anniversary showings of E3, and they were always boring stockholder meetings.
We did get hilarious E3 compilations at least!
Boring? I rewatch the legendary Sony 2006 E3 at least once a month!
Riiiiiiidge Racer! :D
I never said e3 was better. Given the options available now how they handle things now I’d argue could be done much better.
No point in watching the ad parade when 80% of the games are hat stores or GAAS slop and 90% of the remainder are remakes and remasters. The games worth your time and money are ones you’ll hear about when they’re released.
I hate live service games and microtransactions as much as the next guy, but your assessment really doesn’t feel like it matches what I saw come out of the trailers and reveals. Or hell, even the releases so far this year. Which of the big games released this year were hat stores and/or GAAS slop? There are plenty of faults in current gaming but the live service trend does seem to be abating.
Yeah, the bright side of the past couple months is that companies have seemingly finally realized that live service is a losing bet.
I really miss the E3 days but it’s not hard to see why we’ve arrived here.
Also back in the day many if not most presentations were garbage. Half the fun was making fun of them with friends.
For us it’s still an excuse to get everyone together and sometimes it even feels like the old days. Sometimes.
I recently showed a 60-something year old relative the two GTA6 trailers, while explaining my looking forward to trailer 3 and the game’s launch.
They remembered me playing Vice City back in the early 00s, so we watched its first two trailers also and let me tell you - for all of modern gaming’s faults - marketing has gotten a lot better in the intervening years.
marketing has gotten a lot better in the intervening years.
Can’t disagree more. Never been a better time to be a gamer. We’re so spoiled for choice and every genre has so many games, there’s bound to be something for everyone.
Seriously! I’ve never been happier as a gamer who dislikes first person shooters. There’s so many options and variety now!
God, do you remember the hell that was mid-2010’s gaming? 90% of all releases were fps’s with every color just being a different shade of brown.
You and me same, but i think for me i’m just jaded by the abundance amount of game and dev that i can’t really keep up who is what anymore. Nothing is fresh if you ate too much of it over the year, and once your mind tell you “ehh, why bother” you will move on from these hype train. I used to sit through all these livestreamed event but nowadays i just scroll through them and watch what piqued my interest, or play the demo on steam. I think steam indie fest or whatever fest they have yearly stay true to the e3/pax spirit, with no time constraint, no lining up, and on your couch/pc desk. The lack of conversation with dev is not a deal breaker to me.
The Devolver “E3” presentation was always great. I think they stopped making them though.
Devolver went public, had some less than amazing releases and tanked extra hard.
They fell victim to the same things they’d always poked fun at.
I think part of the issue is that there are simply so many games competing for attention now. Even good trailers can blend together after a while.
What usually gets me interested isn’t the trailer itself…it’s when I can quickly understand the game’s core idea and what makes it different from everything else being shown.
i felt like xbox’s showcase did a gretavjob of showing storybdriven gameplay
My bias is showing but Ace Combat 8 really bucked the trend this year.
- Announcement trailer with gameplay and story premise during TGA 2025, releasing 2026.
- Release date trailer during Sony’s state of play with more gameplay, more story beats, now with solidified release date for 4 months out.
- Topping it off with a PC Port announcement of one of the beloved PS2 classics as a pre-order bonus.
That’s a pretty strong, confident marketing campaign, especially when AC7’s first announcement was everything you’d hate: cinematic teaser, no gameplay, no story, no release date, game still 4 years away.
That’s not to say it’s been perfect, they’re doing a pretty gross multiplayer season pass and pre-order bundle. Real hat store shit. But otherwise it’s been quite refreshing compared to all the other games I saw in the last 6 to 10 months.
Me: People still watch game reveals from big events?
For over twenty years, I stopped paying attention to big gaming announcements from big events like E3. I just learned the hard truth that it’s all marketing jazz and when the game is finally released, it is nothing like what was hyped up to be. I don’t even remember what was the game that disappointed me so hard to make me give up looking up game reveals.
I just let the finished product and reviews speak for themselves to influence me on whether or not I will play the game.
