Personally, I think that AAA studios are due for a reality check. There's been _some_ decent releases from these studios in the past decade, but they are few and far between. I can't help but feel that these studios are very disconnected with their audience and have ultimately prioritized profits over passion. I know the bills need to be paid, but somewhere along the line it become more and more noticeable. The market consolidation that's happened (EA and Activision come to mind) has done nothing but hurt the industry. I'd like to call it a monopoly but I'm not certain if that's correct or not. Either way, the current landscape is not great.
I've been gaming since the 90s and I'm generally unhappy with the current state of affairs.
I don't know if I'm still in the target audience (or ever was), but for one thing, I can't even begin to describe how much "games as a service" games put me off. It's really not disgruntlement, but active repulsion, as in I'd actually rather wash my dishes while listening to a podcast than having to play them.
But the amount of people feeling like me might be rounding errors in today's landscape, I don't know...
Then you have releases like Hi-Fi Rush that come out of nowhere, and are almost enraging, because it means they get it. They know how to make interesting, innovative, oddball games. They choose not to.
Fortunately it's still possible to break into the games industry as an indie developer. You can be a solo developer and make a top selling game, if you're really good. Lucas Pope, Toby Fox, etc.
So I don't think we are in any kind of monopoly situation, nor are we in danger of ending up there right now.
The people who do buy AAA games, I suppose it's because they enjoy that sort of thing? I'm not really one of them.
Yes, you can work as lone indie dev, but only if you have savings to sustain you for 2-3 years or if you can live on ramen. For every successful indie game there are thousands of games that never been completed or failed on release.
With small exceptions people buy AAA games from EA / Ubisoft / Activision / etc for the same reason why people go to watch christmas movies - they know what exactly they gonna get. No surprises.
> He is best known for experimental indie games, notably Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, both of which won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize alongside other awards.
Papers, Please was a really nice concept, executed well. It even inspired a few other games, like Contraband Police, which recently came out and is pretty okay (like a 3D spiritual successor, sort of).
> He is known for developing the role-playing video games Undertale and Deltarune for which the former garnered acclaim and he received nominations for a British Academy Game Award, three Game Awards and D.I.C.E. Awards, the latter known as the video game equivalent of the Academy Awards.
Both Undertale and Deltarune didn't seem too impressive on a technical level (e.g. not going for flashy graphics like many modern titles), but the world building, the gameplay mechanics, the character writing and everything else just felt really, really nice and on point.
I guess both of those devs are a good example that projects with a good concept and even better execution are still likely to be quite successful. Personally, I'd definitely also throw the Outer Wilds game on top of this pile as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Wilds
However, such success won't be likely for the majority of the developers out there, which is to be expected. Not that people shouldn't make games that they are passionate about, just that they should set their own expectations accordingly.
It’s almost a habit to buy the big AAA games for me - I’ve bought every AC since the first one and probably will do even if I don’t enjoy them now they’re open world RPG collection simulators. Same with CoD not being as fun as the original MW games.
Agreed. Speaking about passion, I just can't forgive Ubi for what they've done to my beloved Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six games. Nothing good can last forever, but I have a lot of nostalgia for those stories and the games based on them.
Normally I'd be with you but then CoD MW2 came out. It's got your normal old school shooty shooty pew pew... it's got a very good battle royale... and then they also added a version of counter strike that I acutally like, a version of tarkov I actually like, and several other game types, hell even multiple raids like ow2 was supposed to have. It's like an ur shooter with enough people to play in each and every one of these hoppers. It's kinda amazing that it's just fun across the board, so much so I haven't even tried the campaigns.
Stepping back there's been many excellent AAA games in the last 3 / 5 / 10 years. There have never really been that many (sub 30) AAA studios. People move in and out all the time. They each ship a game every 3-6 years. That's kinda the name of the game.
What games did you dislike? what did you try, what disappointing you? You talk really abstractly / vaguely.
I agree, they both feel different. However they're very "sweaty"... and I don't have the time to get into them so I've bounced off both very hard. I enjoy watching people play tarkov but if I had a disk of tarkov it would long ago been burned in effigy.
I've been much enjoying Single Player Tarkov lately. Much less sweaty when I don't have to watch out for people who have perfected their pixel hunting headshot skills with two decades of AWP practice in CS1.6.
That reality check is nowhere in sight. The games industry beats the TV+Movies industry combined in annual revenue.
IMO the real underlying issue is publishers being far too overbearing on the dev studios. There's plenty of industries where you'll really never hear of the parent company unless you actively look for who owns what. Which reflects a much greater degree of autonomy (do what you want, but meet the bottom line for our investors).
It doesn't appear that game studios today acquired by big publishers have ANY autonomy, which is why they get tanked with high frequency. If you were to do an E3 today (setting aside the political dimensions) the publishers are so self-unaware they'll smother every studio with their brand. It'll be one big microsoft booth vs one big sony booth. Totally idiotic.
> and have ultimately prioritized profits over passion
Videogaming industry is going through its "Airbnb averaging effect" which already killed original movies in favor of remakes, reboots, sequels and the same formulas that are known sellers.
At the end AAA studios require huge investments they will only produce products that will sell and risk very little.
Do they? We are currently seeing the price of asset productions through AI dropping through the cellar floor. And what else remains then? Engine scripting? Can be done via CGPT. Level design..
My guess is that we are 3 years away from some indy studio showing up with a tripple AAA title out of nowhere..
Why should they experience a "reality check"? They are absurdly profitable and very reliable in what they do. The exact same videogame but now it's this year is purchased by millions of people every single time. There hasn't been much change in madden since 08, except maybe in negative directions, but people still buy it, and have all sorts of cope reason, but they just don't really care that much.
The reality is, the "masses" don't want art, or carefully crafted experiences. What they buy in droves is junk food, reality television, and call of duty.
Tell Blizzard about it. With WoW "classic", they are literally selling the same series of games... twice. You thought loot boxes were the cash king, these guys are on a whole other level. Or all the "remakes", a testament to the industry's lack of creativity; get a game from the 90s, redo the assets and rendering engine... bam, profits!
This is ignoring the fact that WoW players had been clamoring for Blizzard to find a way to bring back classic servers for years. It even lead to the infamous “you think you do but you don’t” meme when a player asked J. Allen Brack if it would ever happen at Blizzcon. They’re not even being cashgrabby about it imo, a subscription to modern day wow means you can play classic wow for “free” and vice versa.
Nintendo had like 700+ US games and most of them were garbage. The video game crash of 83 was because of how much hot trash was released. Today I think that most games are amazing quality, perhaps you could say some are milking a franchise but what about "Last of Us", "God of War (reboot)", "Ragnorok".
This notion that anything made by large companies is more likely to be feels like it comes not from some subjective assessment but a general anti-establishment attitude of the person. For some reason it seems everything new is always worse than before no matter when it happens.
Point of order, it was Atari rather than Nintendo who killed the industry with trash games. Nintendo came later and actively took steps to distance themselves from Atari, including monopolizing the ability to make games on their platform (ostensibly) to prevent such a thing from happening again
The games I enjoy playing are all indie games. However the AAA studios are making so much money that they don’t care about minorities like us. So obviously there is a huge market for what they deliver.
I worked at Nintendo as a Product Manager from 2010 to 2014. I loved my time there to bits - the people, the culture, the products, and the business were great. They make the only games I still play occasionally.
I frequently get asked: "Why did you leave"?
The main reason is I saw the writings on the wall. The industry was turning to pay-to-win garbage, and although I had already seen a similar pattern with arcades as a kid, that's not what I had signed up for.
> The email said that while E3 "remains a beloved event and brand" that the 2023 version "simply did not garner the sustained interest necessary to execute it in a way that would showcase the size, strength, and impact of our industry."
The size, strength and impact of the industry is measured in billions of dollars and eye-watering margins, much larger than when I left, but...
As it turns out, an annual event for neuropsychologically optimized, dopamine-exploiting, cash-harvesting, artistically low-effort mobile games, with the occasional worthy AAA or indie game sparkled in, doesn't pan out.
Color me surprised. And thankful, that while these games make billions - like gambling - no one gathers 'round to celebrate.
There's still so many good games without any of that crap though. Two I've played recently (the only two games I've played in the last year, actually):
Stray: it's simple, peaceful. Not groundbreaking except that you're a cat, but playing it makes me feel relaxed and I can play 30 minutes at a time.
Tunic: I kinda rushed through this unfortunately because I'm an adult and I don't have weeks to sink into a game. But... this is one of the best games I've ever played. It's deceptive. You're a little fox running around a cartoony world. But then it just gets so much deeper, and deeper, and deeper. I wish I could play it again and spend a year figuring it all out by myself.
Both of these games are clearly made with genuine passion for gaming as a medium. Stray's graphics are not far off a AAA game from a few years ago (except smaller in scope of course). Tunics graphics are actually incredibly too, the simplicity plays so much into how the game draws you in, deceptively.
> I'm an adult and I don't have weeks to sink into a game
I play about a game a year on average, and I still follow the industry out of the corner of my eye. I most recently played Hades and it blew my mind, stylistically and gameplay-wise. It's like someone threw into a blender some of the best game concepts in the last four decades, a few books on Greek mythology, a dash of ingenuity and creativity, and a game came out - in what looks to be a fairly economical product, too.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of professionals trying to make honest-to-god works of interactive entertainment. And I wouldn't begrudge anyone trying their best to make a career work, anyway.
But:
> There's still so many good games without any of that crap though
Well, not enough to sustain an event of games that don't suck, apparently! E3 marked a video games summer solstice of sorts when I was a little kid, a feeling which permeated into my first job out of college.
But you're right, and I'm just being nostalgic: the art in its purest form will probably never die.
> The main reason is I saw the writings on the wall. The industry was turning to pay-to-win garbage, and although I had already seen a similar pattern with arcades as a kid, that's not what I had signed up for.
I don't really think Nintendo has though? (Outside of a few of their mobile games, but that never seemed to be a significant part of their business.)
Am I wrong, am I out of touch? I can't remember the last time a big banger came out. I look at the Steam top played list and it's the same stuff from like a decade or two ago.
Yuck.
The constant push for games to be living breathing things shoving microtransactions in my face instead of just being a purchased product doesn't help. The community should be living and breathing, not the changelogs that obnoxiously pop up when I'm trying to play a game.
Variously from the last few years: Cyberpunk, Hogwarts Legacy, God of War Ragnarok, Elden Ring. Red Dead 2 in 2018. Atomic Heart was promoted like a banger but I bounced off of it. Starfield is coming soon, as is the new Legend of Zelda.
Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy are probably two bangers I recognize, but all the rest never caught my attention.
Cyberpunk did, but I relegated it to the No Man's Sky category and never have any intention of buying it. Goodwill is a thing and losing it can permanently tarnish your reputation.
Both Cyberpunk and (especially) No Man's Sky have improved significantly from how they were at launch. It might be worth looking into their current iterations if you were interested before but disappointed.
I think I basically settled on the idea that if a company is willing to do that to customers, I'm not interested in being one of theirs, ever. That's probably too harsh, but life is rich and there are other options.
Gaming has just become so popular that the top played games are a rather predictable "average" of the different tastes of a vast variety of gamers. But the average is always also quite boring (unless you're young and haven't seen this stuff yet a thousand times).
You need to look into the niches and at the "genre edges" to find the interesting stuff. Especially Steam is full of really great "niche games". Just don't look at the top 10, you actively have to find the good stuff.
Same here. I bought it on the strength of the rave reviews and found it incredibly boring. The world has a cool vibe but the gameplay and mechanics are so so clunky. Coming from the latest Zelda game, which was kinda similar (open world, you have a horse) but absolutely 11/10 spectacular in every respect, it felt like a huge step down.
This is a feature though, it's what makes it unique and great.
I had the exact same impression when I first tried Demon's Souls as it came out around 2010. I knew the game was supposed to be hard, but it felt hard for no reason, as if they had made it clunky just to mess with you.
I ignored the whole souls genre until I finally picked up the remake on the PS5 about a year ago, and it all clicked this time. It's clunky in an effort to be more realistic than many superficially similar games, and that requires you to play it differently too. Your attacks have a wind-up and cool-down period, you got stats preventing you from carrying too much gear and get even clunkier, endurance stopping you from maneuvering like a mad man etc. All these limitations are there to force you to be more strategic with your leveling, equipment, fighting, .. They're very deliberate and not "design problems that make it player-unfriendly".
It's not for everyone, but it's a different experience many clearly find rewarding. And honestly, the games aren't even that hard once you grasp these concepts.
>more realistic than many superficially similar games,
BS, it's about fake difficulty. If it was about "realism" you could hide from a dragon's attack behind a wall, but in Dark Souls 2 at least the dragons fire goes right through it.
Some people crave fake difficulty, as you can see when they were so against adding an "easy" mode, and these games are for them, but making gameplay purposely frustrating is dumb.
It's not about "fake difficulty" it's about real difficulty.
It's about a game that actually expects you to overcome hard things, not just wander through the theme park.
There are plenty of other easy mode games out there, people are welcome to play those. I highly respect FromSoft for standing firm that the challenge is the experience they want to deliver and they aren't putting in easy mode.
People can complain about it, but that's what FromSoft wants to do with their product and the success shows that it's a very popular choice.
Kinda the same way I feel about some of the survival modes for Skyrim or Fallout.
Adds a lot of realism -- "realisim" in a game where you kill dragons -- and changes how you play. Kinda cool, but also long, low, and slow. Lots of just walking... kinda boring.
IDK. I don't really mind difficult games. Hades is an all time favorite for me. But in Elden Ring, I just didn't feel like the core gameplay loop was very fun or satisfying.
There's a T-shirt with 'I didn't beat dark souls' on the front of it and on the back, "it has a lot of design problems that make it player-unfriendly and difficult to enjoy but the culture surrounding it actively ignores these elements in favor of hyping it up as the hardest video game ever (a title it definitely doesn't have a claim to) and claiming that anyone who takes issue with problems must just be bad at video games in general".
The joke is that most peoples first time with a FromSoft game results in them thinking/feeling that the game is bad/boring. I'm not saying you're wrong for not enjoying it, I'm just saying you have a lot of company.
I feel that Elden Ring is a bit too open for a From Software game. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro, which I all love but suck at, are all a bit more directional in terms of where you need to go. You can "crawl" an area a bit more, whereas Elden Ring just feels too expansive. I'm often asking "is this where I'm even supposed to be at?". That can be fun in a mystical sort of way, but it makes it hard to even know what I should be working towards. Plus, their RPG elements run deep, and you need to basically live on the forums and wiki to understand how to piece together a build. Winging it is fine, but it usually means you've stunted yourself in some unclear way. This is why I also really like Sekiro, which removed some of that.
If you want a relatively new game that is maybe not a AAA release, but a big banger, go play Outer Wilds. It's from 2019, so relatively new compared to "a decade ago", and it changed my perception of what games can be. (Important warning: If you do decide to play it, go in as blind as possible. It's a game where you progress by gaining knowledge about the world, so any spoilers are incredibly catastrophic.)
Totally opposite for me. Getting a PS5 alone gave me access to such a large backlog of great games. I don't think any of them had microtransactions, at least I never purchased anything else than the game itself. I'm mostly thinking PS (ex)-exclusives, you can enjoy many of them on PC as well nowadays.
Cyberpunk was the last banger for me. But I’m excited for Diablo 4 and Baldurs Gate 3 this year. Elden Ring was huge and the new Zelda is gonna be big.
I have been a genre fan for a very long time. Before the isometric/top-down dungeon crawler, there were First-person dungeon crawlers and I loved Eye Of The Beholder and Lands Of Lore indeed three decades ago now. And then of course Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Lord Of Destruction. All of that was good.
And came Diablo 3 and I didn't like the reviews so I waited and then I tried the game, I wanted it to be good so much, everyone said it plays better on console so for the first time in my life I got hold of a console, an Xbox 360 and played with it. I can't say I got hooked.
I did get hooked on Path Of Exile four years ago though.
So I tried Diablo 4 and it is a console-first game again which is a death knell to a game like this by itself, it can't be avoided, there's just more keys on the keyboard, your design field is narrowed to design for controllers. But it's also a hamfisted MMO. I want none of that.
I don't mean to single you out, as these games are (probably) going to be awesome. I've played Cyberpunk, and I'll almost certainly play Baldur's Gate 3.
But isn't it interesting that 3 of the 5 games you've mentioned are sequels, and one of the remaining ones is part of a well-established formula?
I would. The engine is clearly hugely upgraded and they've definitely added a lot to the formula, but they've also kept a lot about what people loved of the original games. I'm really looking forward to the final release
Huh, I don't see any of the original in it. Aesthetics, gameplay, and even tone of the game are all way more Divinity than anything Black Isle ever made.
What of the originals do you still see in Larian's new one?
Hmmm.... I played through both Baulder's Gate, BG2 and a bunch of the associated games - Icewind Dale etc. Had a very familiar feel to me. Obviously your milage varies
I played on release on Stadia and loved it. I didn’t have all those issues others had. Instant boot times, no patch downloading. And then Google gave me all the money back I invested just to play that game when stadia went unser. So really a 10/10 experience for me.
I agree with many of the others, but I'd also like to mention Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima, etc. HZD was one of the best single player games I've played in a long time -- satisfying gameplay loop, and a story that was engaging. I haven't played Ghost of Tsushima yet (I only have a PC), but I feel like that's another good quality game contender that I will enjoy (even if I never finish).
In contrast, I'm currently playing Jedi: Fallen Order. In many ways, it's _really good_: Good voice acting, motion capture, interesting story. Combat is hard (for me) and satisfying, similar to the Witcher (but not as satisfying as Souls games), but it somehow _really bugs me_ that the items I collect are all cosmetic items that don't matter, and that the things to climb or wall-run on are very specific and jarringly placed things (versus breath of the wild, where everything can be climbed). The game feels "on rails" in a way that the others don't, and I disliked that, but it is certainly delivering on the story and combat front.
The recent trend for me is games that look amazing on paper (in pre-release dev-diaries, etc.) but then fall completely flat in release, often being much more shallow then I expected and more than often broken, barely playable, and just disappointing.
I’ve almost written a couple rant on this threads about some of the recent PDX titles, thankfully, I don’t feel like trying to type all that in the little HN text box.
The focus of the event is a big part of it. GDC is a developer conference, and showcasing games in development is very small part of it. PAX is an event for gamers and while a lot of games do get showcased, it's not the main purpose of the event.
Traditionally E3 was about developers showcasing games for the press. But that's always been a bit of a tough sell for a major event, and I'm not surprised it's struggling given the current media landscape.
Possibly, the ESA relied on it for revenue. Though PAX is run by a for profit event company, I think.
PAX is better at managing a public event. E3 wasn't originally open to the public, and once they opened up it was never done very well. If publishers want to have that public convention thing, PAX is better. Letting the public in to E3 sort of ruined the industry insider aspect of the convention, all the meetings moved to hotel rooms so that people could hear each other.
Is this part of a trend? Companies are realizing it's cheaper and more effective to just announce things online. WWDC 2023 is once again streaming only. I imagine that is much easier for them to put on as you can just record and edit the talks in advance. Still, it's a shame if we have fewer of these big events. For those who've attended anything like them, it's quite fun to see things in person and socialize.
The truth is the opposite. I went to the first E3 the day before I began my first day at Activision. In those days it was the only game show in North America. You could walk in and say hi to the CEO. There weren’t a lot of ways to communicate about your products and your company. Who you really wanted to reach in those days was buyers for stores. The press barely existed.
Since then it has gone through so many permutations. You started to care more about the press then the public. Then you started to be able to really promote games online.
So is E3 failing because its more effective to promote online then at live events? No. In fact if you have a good budget to promote a game you are going to spend more of it on live events then you did in the old days. The why is complicated, but I would say the main reason is its harder to advertise online then it used to be, press has less influence and you need to have organic interest.
So every big publisher has their own live event. And people spend a fortune on PAX, various ComiCons, etc. All of this stuff went online because of COVID but it is coming back bigger.
The problem for E3 was that when it started it was the only game in town. Now the business is exponentially bigger and there are many events to choose from. If you have deep pockets or a loyal fan base you can your own event.
It feels like for the consumer side game announcments and marketing have moved to the platform holders events, which are online streams. Nintendo Direct, Playstation "State of Play", the Xbox thing.
If it's not a console game there is the publishers/developers own marketing or something like PAX or the Game Awards.
There is also that local cons are more available now and you can upload the presentations at those to reach people not in your area.
International developers have a harder time of it since they need to travel long hours and sort out visas. And a lot of game dev is outside US. In general COVID kind of spurred rethinking of how much business travel is truly needed or desired.
I think the E3 made a lot of sense in the time when most game news were trough magazines... but now, official channels from developers and console makers have an enormous reach so they don't have pressure to follow an external calendar.
But yeah, I will miss the E3, was like Christmas eve to get hyped up about future releases. I hope hardware focused expos like CES or computex survive these trend shift
Why should a company choose to make their announcements have to fight against every other announcement in the entire industry. That’s a great way for your story to be buried.
If you hold your own event, it’s YOUR show. You can show what you want, when you want, your way. You don’t have to compete. You don’t have to pay someone else for the privilege.
Aren’t some companies dropping out (or at least holding many announcements back) from CES as well?
You no longer have to convince the press to cover you, you can reach your audience directly. For video games a trade show doesn’t make much sense.
If you hold your own event, it’s YOUR show. You can show what you want, when you want, your way. You don’t have to compete. You don’t have to pay someone else for the privilege.
You say that as if BlizzCon hasn’t gone from competing with E3 to dead in less than five years.
I think here a more direct competitor to the E3 role would be the "Nintendo Direct" streams or Sony's State of Play.
BlizzCon it's own can of worms, after the Diablo Immortal meme, and all the scandals, organizing that event has to be challenging. I don't envy that job.
Something to take into consideration is "the cringe factor". E3 is infamous(?) for live presentations that go very poorly with the audience. Honestly for some people it was the show's main draw, to see moments like "giant enemy crab" or the Konami 2010 event. Companies like Nintendo realized that prerecorded videos are much, much safer.
It's worth noting that, for the past 15 years or so, only a small fraction of Apple's developer community has been able to attend WWDC in person. These fortunate individuals won the lottery and could afford the time and cost of attending. While it was great for them, it was not so great for everyone else who missed out on the opportunity to network with other developers and talk to Apple engineers. Moving the event online makes it much fairer for everyone.
Also, WWDC 2023 still includes an in-person event. The difference now is that attendees will no longer have exclusive access to labs and technical support.
I think it's less about announcing yourself online, but announcing yourself when and where you wanted to.
The writing was on the wall when Apple pulled out of Macworld for their annual keynote in 2008. Why do these companies need someone elses stage to announce their products?
I assume they want(ed) the hype & reaction though - just like recording a sitcom or chat show in front of a live audience, most people watching aren't there!
The age of that "wonder" feeling when you see a new game has ended. Most people already know what's going to be showns in E3, mostly things they don't care about
Has it? Or has it just ended for you? I don't really game at all any more, I just mean maybe teenagers are just as hyped as we were then; the age hasn't passed, but we've aged.
Subjectively, the few teens I interact with seem hyped for new installments in old franchises, updates to existing games with more content, or remakes of old classics. I don't think there's as much excitement for new franchises, because of a wave of overpromising over the last decade.
The center of cultural gravity has definitely shifted. In the 90's we were still firmly in the mass-market model of doing: if you saw something new in gaming it was probably through the TV or a magazine, and it was presented as some exclusive, earthshaking experience that you were buying access to like a movie ticket.
Nowadays it's much more common to learn about something through "influencer" media, and part of the appeal is not within the game content, but in the game's affordances as a virtual world: being able to play with your Discord friends or the Twitch streamer you watch, and how much it supports roleplaying and "content creation". A lot of gaming is also purely online-competitive, too, a phenomenon that relies on widespread broadband connectivity and isn't really about graphics - witness the popularity of online chess. The experiential games that hit big and stay memetic for long periods have mostly been indie lately: the AAA stuff has nice graphics and courts a certain niche, but it just washes over the market without much lasting impact.
Altogether, there are a ton of things that make it so that teenagers can be hyped, but not about the same things in the same ways. It's widely accessible stuff, and less clearly driven by the consumer-electronics relationship.
That still doesn't change the fact that the release news has changed drastically. Sure, teenagers today probably like to game more than yesteryear's teenagers that are all middleaged boomers now. News at 11! The point isn't a lack of nostalgia, it's that there's no mystery to reveal at a big show. Studios release teasers, arrange for "leaks", or any other ways of keeping they hype machine rolling.
really? 24/7 live coverage via streaming from the likes of youtube, twitch, or which ever social platform of choice delivered straight to your eye holes with a pestering notification for immediate consumption vs maybe receiving a magazine in the mail or at the newstand once a month. yeah, sounds the same thing to me. nothing new has changed here at all.
i get you trying to check the nostalgia, but if you think news delivery is any where close to the same today as it was in the 90s, you must have had some future tech available to you in the 90s
I thought E3 ended ages ago with more companies going direct. That's probably why they weren't able to get enough interest: between people who are sure they remember either a shutdown or a major change and actual structural changes, there weren't enough people.
Oh yeah, they tried to continue without Apple but most of those claiming they would be fine had that thousand mile stare . They knew it was done, just didn't want to admit it that quickly.
Nintendo at PAX East this year had about 30 consoles set up for mario kart, and tangentially a pokemon card game setup. No new releases or anything to promote that isn't already heavily monetized.
I'd say the floor of pax was about 20 percent emptier than last year, which was already abouu 30 percent emptier than pre-covid. Indie area was down by about half which was the biggest writing on the wall to me. Tabletop still going strong, but the vendors associated with them where also hit hard.
Hmm, 20% emptier than last year sounds bad for PAX East. I wonder if will die like PAX South.
PAX West 2022 was larger than 2021 and seems to have had a more solid Nintendo presence, with prerelease Splatoon 3 and multiple Nintendo VS tournaments, as well as a number of third-party playable games. There was also a large Pokémon TCG area on the show floor.
Perhaps West is a good venue for Nintendo of America since it is more local to their HQ in Redmond. I think there might be another big company near there also, though I'm not sure whether they will ever return to PAX etc..
On the one hand I'm happy that gaming is gaining recognition in a way that makes it a more sustainable career option; on the other hand it's clear that once enough money starts flowing in, more or less organic & authentic community endeavors like E3 are going to be the first to go, all in favor of siloing (I'd wager big players not attending is more of a management decision than anything else).
??? From my understanding E3 became irrelevant years ago. Most indie-video game announcements are coming in at like, PAX instead... or other conventions that are more authentic.
E3 was a gaming-news icon, but it just hasn't kept up with the times. It has no niche and was pulled apart by more specialized conventions. Organic authenticity is better from smaller conventions... while corporate news would rather be Nintendo Direct or other such Youtube/Direct media and marketing.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but E3 was always run by and for big companies. It's never been an organic or community-led effort. The ESA is not a collection of indies or average folk.
I didn't mean to say it was a grassroots effort, just that it brought people together without too much of an artificial facade. Sure, at the bottom it was an advertisement event, but it's still fun when everything is in the same place. Now it feels like the big companies are at each other's throat and there's somewhat less of an ability to just have fun. Then again, maybe I just contracted a case of rose-tinted glasses.
it used to be like almost 20 years ago lol, at some point it went invite only or something more exclusive. i remember it seemed like a big event when i was a kid and used to get hyped for content
Over the last couple of decades the video gaming industry has consolidated into Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and a long tail of indie developers. The big players all have their own events, so there's really no one left to pay conferences like E3 big bucks for publicity.
Tradeshows for videogames is kindof an outdated concept now with every game company having easy access to live streaming and social media. I grew up with E3 and I'm a little sad to see it go, but that's just the world changing and becoming more efficient.
Agreed and disagreed. Trade shows, E3 in particular, was where studios gave you a taste, a preview, an announcement, got you excited. All in one place. I'd often read all the happenings next day for things to keep on my radar.
Sure, studios can just announce and stream themselves whenever, but for some market of people who hopefully isn't just me, I don't have time or will to follow every studio or read gaming news with any cadence, so I won't know what's coming.
> Trade shows, E3 in particular, was where studios gave you a taste, a preview, an announcement, got you excited
All of this has moved to The Game Awards now, probably because companies don't necessarily need to actually pay to attend. PAX is also still a thing.
> But maybe that's just me getting old.
Probably - all of the eyeballs are on twitter/youtube/facebook now and they can pay to shove themselves into your feed. Companies get more bank for their buck spending their millions of advertising budget on those platforms rather than spending that money on a day or two at a tradeshow.
Zero chance GDC goes away, it's a developer focused conference and is way more than just press releases and announcements. If you've never been to it GDC is non-stop talks and technical sessions, it's an invaluable resource for people in the industry.
I wouldn't be so sure about that TBH. Before Covid a lot of people were already complaining that it's starting to get really expensive to attend in person (especially from Europe), and technical presentations can just as well be attended online or later at your own leisure. Which basically only leaves the parties as a reason to attend, and games companies might start thinking twice whether that's worth the money to send their employees in person ;)
No one ever went to GDC for technical presentations. It was always about networking and no amount of online events can replace face-to-face meetings when it's comes to business. Yeah you can reach a lot of people through friends of friends and Linkedin, but it's much easier to get funding or publishing deal in-person.
Also jobs in gamedev usually pay way below other IT markets and being part of community and parties is one of ways companies keep their staff from leaving for better paying jobs.
E3 has traditionally been aimed at the media. It's only been in resent years that the general public has been allowed in, and even that move was seen by most as a attempt to keep the event from dying.
Back in its heyday E3 was purely a business event (e.g. you had to work in the games industry one way or another to be allowed in). Might have changed in recent years though, I didn't really pay attention anymore since around 2010 or so.
Actually the first few E3 was open to anyone. Then for a few years they had a day where anyone could come. One of my happiest memories was demonstrating my game on the floor of E3 to fans. It was really nice to talk to gamers about the game after spending time with the retail chains and press.
Then E3 got so big you had to be in the industry. Then another year they tried to move it to multiple venues. That is the core problem- who is E3 for? GDC is for game developers.
I usually followed E3 for the Nintendo content. With Nintendo Direct events being so frequent and production values being so good, E3 makes no sense anymore.
Might as well cancel it. The games are non-existent. and the quality of the games they have been releasing look like xbox 360 graphics. Not to mention Microsoft buying up every studio they can get their hands on.
That's not why it's being cancelled. Most of the big players will still have press conferences and/or in-person events this summer, they are just doing them themselves rather than under the E3 umbrella.
AAA gaming - as we have known it - is dead as long as major platforms continue with 30% commissions. All of the profits accrue to the platform owners, with studios either failing or being acquired by them.
The end result is a weak industry mostly dominated by skinner box free2play games or gambling apps.
AAA games are most likely doing better than ever. Which might exactly be the problem why E3 is no longer relevant. The platform owners and big game publishers now prefer to host their own announcement events at different times of the year instead of having to compete for gamer attention all within the same crammed time window of a few days.
I think E3 was already kind of an hollowed out husk in the years before, for instance Sony already skipped and did their own thing in 2019: https://gamerant.com/sony-skip-e3-2019-why/
It started dying in the early 2010s / late 2000s. Kids stopped buying fat monthly magazines to learn about new games and started consuming all that information online, for free.
died from a lack of feminine energy, since different people got them to neuter it. and look at that, nobody's interested.
should have taken a page out of the promoter and hospitality economy, kept it sexy and ignored people uncomfortable with that. because in hindsight, that was inclusion too.
there was a crusade against "booth babes" a long time ago that may have started with E3 and expanded to every other tech event by the mid 2010s, notably this push never involved the opinions of the "booth babes" in question, whose interest in being a part of those kinds of events are just as valid as the people that became uncomfortable with them
A lot of similar sentiment is ignored in other hospitality sectors and taken to much further extremes of femininity, it works pretty well. Deals are made. E3 would still have post covid demand too as people are interested in experiences that include that. The major studios would have wanted to be a part of that, because everyone would want an excuse to go.
The “inclusion by exclusion” philosophy was mostly a west coast phenomenon, whereas if you look at tech events in Miami - which contain the same people - you’ll see prideful attendance by all, including what would have been considered “booth babes” and other performers
I've been gaming since the 90s and I'm generally unhappy with the current state of affairs.
Thank god for indie devs!
/end rant