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Is E3 Losing Relevance?

Is E3 Losing Relevance?

There was a time when E3 meant big things for the video game industry. The yearly convention was basically one giant info-dump where everyone on the development side of things got to share what they’d been working on with everyone on the press side of things. The press would then go on to report the new to its readers, and then we all got to sit around and wait for the new games to actually start shipping.

This is all kind of how things still work today in 2015, but with a few key differences that leave me wondering if E3 really has the same significance that it did, say, 15 years ago. E3 remains the best spectacle across the entire industry; there’s no other trade show or convention that gets people so excited and worked up. While it can be entertaining to attend (assuming you’re with the press- even though it’s never really been that hard to sneak in), or entertaining to watch via live-streaming (a recent innovation), the problem is one of conveying information.

Things are different today than they were back during E3’s inception. Information, the press, release information, dates, trailers, preview coverage… all of these things factor into the odd position E3 currently finds itself in. None of it works the same as it used to, and at times it feels like the powers that be behind the show just kind of ignore the fact that we live in a digital world. Information on upcoming games leaks days, sometimes even weeks before the convention begins. Sometimes it’s even leaked by the studios behind the games themselves. So what’s a trade show built around surprise announcements when there are no surprise announcements?

Is E3 Losing Relevance?

That’s the point where E3 stops being about the games, and starts being about the spectacle, and waiting to see what goes wrong. Will someone flub their lines? Will a confirmed game mysteriously be absent once a presentation gets underway? What’s the behind the scenes chatter on Twitter? This is what E3 has become. That’s not to say that it’s a bad thing, but I just wish the show runners embraced it more than they do. There’s nothing worse than stale line-reading and hired actors going through the motions of a skit or announcement. Let the show be more loose and free-form. Let it evolve and grow as the world around it has.

My worries are that if E3 clings tight to its old ways, it will continue to slide into redundancy, and we’ll lose the greatest carnival show our industry has to offer. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

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