For the best part of 15 years, every June I would get on a plane to Los Angeles to cover E3. It was the giant video games conference where most of the major games and consoles of the past few decades were first shown, from the PlayStation to the Wii U, Fallout 4 to Final Fantasy VII Remake. Alas, the pandemic killed E3, and so this year we have a cluster of loosely affiliated and competing events instead: Summer Game Fest, run by Geoff Keighley of the Game Awards; the Xbox Games Showcase; indie-driven event Day of the Devs and many more. It all kicks off tomorrow, 6 June.
Publishers such as Ubisoft and Devolver are hosting their own broadcasts. Other former E3 standbys, such as EA and Square-Enix, are absent. There’s a live show from IGN, the huge games and entertainment website – I used to work there in the glory days of E3 in the early 2010s, when the company would hire out a studio and we would basically run a four-day continuous broadcast of all the announcements. Basically what appears to have happened is that we’re still getting at least as much gaming news as we would have at E3, but now it’s super diffuse, and also crammed into a single weekend as opposed to a week-long conference.
