It seems very likely that the biggest event on the video game calendar for the past 25 years, E3, is finished.
The announcement last week that the 2023 event had been cancelled wasn’t met with a huge amount of surprise in the industry – it’s enormously expensive to exhibit on the show floor, it’s a major commitment for development teams (already stretched by the pandemic) to provide playable demos, and the introduction of digital-only events such as Nintendo Direct and PlayStation State of Play has shown that it’s possible to reach global audiences without having to pay anywhere between $20,000 and $1.5m for a big booth amid the horrible expanse of downtown Los Angeles.
The organisers haven’t ruled out a reappearance of the event in some future year, but it seems incredibly unlikely that it will ever again run in the same wild, ostentatious, bloated format.
Everybody in the industry is nodding sagely and talking about how out of date the event was and how video game marketing has changed in the digital era. What fewer people are doing is questioning whether this is actually a good thing. E3 was unique. It was a place where publishers cut deals with developers, where retailers decided which titles were going to fill their shelves in the weeks up to Christmas and where people got to see next year’s biggest titles first. It was part trade show, part hype-fest, and it was the only place reporters could get access to everyone from the newest indie coders to the head of Xbox. Much is going to be lost.
It’s no surprise that major publishers and console manufacturers prefer their own digital events to a big conference. They’re cheaper, there’s no requirement to compete for attention with rival companies and the messaging can be completely controlled. Games journalists and industry pundits can be cut out of the equation completely. Video game influencers are now more likely to be part of streams and to be given exclusive access to spokespeople and unreleased games – they’re cheerleaders not analysts. At E3, on the other hand, spokespeople were hugely exposed to scrutiny and skeptical questioning, and interviews were less predictable. When I interviewed then-head of Xbox Phil Harrison at E3 in 2014, I got so frustrated with his stock replies that I wrote up the article as an analysis of media training. The article got shared quite a bit and exposed some of the artifice in games promotion, but it couldn’t have happened if Phil hadn’t been right there talking to me in the flesh.
So what are we getting in a potentially E3-free future? An increasingly curated and sanitised publicity process. There remain other major game events on the calendar. GamesCom in Cologne fulfils a lot of the business and promotional roles of E3, but it’s never been able to compete in terms of global hype and mainstream media coverage. The likes of Pax and EGX are good consumer events, but they offer little for journalists.
E3 was a mess, but it was a hot mess – the collision of differing objectives, the sheer intensity, the buzz that went round the show floor when a brand new game was playing well, or very badly, was unique. Without it we won’t get weird moments like Giant Enemy Crabs, we won’t get gay Sims kissing, we won’t get Keanu shouting “no, you’re breathtaking” at an audience member, we won’t get Sony utterly owning Microsoft with a joke about Xbox One’s incomprehensible digital rights management.
What we’re losing are moments of genuine shock and surprise – the very things we look for in entertainment. Video games aren’t just another arm of the tech industry, they’re not just products – they’re tactile, they’re interactive, they’re culture, they’re art. If we really want to understand the people who make them and why they make them, we need to see and hear from those people in an environment where things aren’t tightly scripted and rigorously message controlled. Very often a digital showcase is just a compilation of trailers book-ended by an excitable, carefully picked presenter. But a live stream from an E3 showcase showed an audience in a theatre reacting with cheers and ovations. And to be in that audience when something big happened – it was a thrill. People feed off the buzz of other people – it’s human nature.
E3 was far from perfect, but the things it got right will never be replicated in a live stream.
What to play
Sega has done some crazy things in its time (Segagaga, Seaman, the 32X, I could go on), but The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog might just beat them all. It’s a free game given out seemingly as an April fool, in which Sonic’s love interest Amy and pals must discover who killed Sega’s spiky mascot by gathering evidence and interviewing suspects – and it all happens on a train. Taking the form of a visual novel with short platforming interludes it’s a funny, extremely meta puzzler created with genuine flair. If you have always yearned for a mashup of Agatha Christie, Sonic and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney here, incredibly, is your chance to try it.
Available on: PC, Mac
Approximate playtime: Three hours
What to click
The Super Mario Bros Movie review – wackily eccentric gamer guys fall flat on screen
Deals, drama and danger: the incredible true story behind Tetris
Rytmos review – a tasteful musical mind-teaser
‘Luigi has sweet notes of apple’: testing out Lush’s unlikely Super Mario soaps
What to read
GamesIndustry.biz has the latest figures on the UK games market. According to trade body UKIE, the industry was worth £7.05bn in 2022, down 17% on 2021, but still higher than pre-pandemic figures. The biggest selling games were Fifa 23 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, surprising … exactly no one.
Film studio Legendary has secured the movie rights to Street Fighter according to Hollywood Reporter. No doubt inspired by the success of recent Sonic and The Last of Us tie-ins, the company has bravely overlooked the critical mauling handed out to the original Street Fighter film and the financial bomb of follow-up Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.
Bloomberg has a piece looking into Saudi Arabia’s continued efforts to diversify its economy by investing heavily in video games. This comes after Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced plans to make Saudi Arabia “the ultimate global hub for the games and esports sector by 2030”. Bloomberg puts the investment at $38bn. The games industry is about to wade into another moral quagmire.
Meanwhile, Eurogamer ran a great list of games to play on International Transgender Day of Visibility. Trans creators and trans stories are a vital component of video game culture, so let’s continue making them visible all year round.
Question block
Regular reader Iain was surprised by one of the winners at last week’s Bafta Games Awards (as was everyone, honestly):
“Can anyone explain how on earth Vampire Survivors merits GOTY at the Bafta Games Awards? It appears to have been resurrected from the days of the Atari and Commodore 64 consoles.”
Pushing Buttons’ own Keza MacDonald was at the awards, so I’ll hand over to her to answer:
“You’re right, Iain, Vampire Survivors does look like something from the oldest days of video games – but it brings in all of the game-design lessons that have been learned in the decades since, and it is a slice of perfection. It was a surprise winner, for sure, made by a very small team who couldn’t achieve anything like the graphical and technical sophistication of some of the other nominees, such as God of War Ragnarok and Elden Ring (both of which were made by 100+ people). But it’s such a brilliant game that it’s a worthy winner nonetheless. I defy anyone to play it and resist its simple, generous, gratifying loop of killing things, collecting things, becoming more powerful, getting overwhelmed and starting again. It strips away everything but the essentials of enticing game design.”
