One of the things I'm thinking here is that 3rd party studios rely on the giants as much as the giants rely on the 3rd party studios.
They need the grand stage and all the attention those grand stages provide to help move units as well. That's why marketing deals are secured.
It comes with a cost of course - the cost of
a) make sure there is a pro/x variant
b) make sure it's 4K
c) give me exclusive content
d) game pass/play anywhere/some frame rate stuff etc
It's never just as cut and dry as, just market my game. Sometimes it is, but most times I don't think so.
Having said that, Sony and MS have the power to determine which of 3P games go on their stage when it fits the narrative they want to sell.
And so, ignoring exclusives, its slightly problematic to let your competitor have all of E3. You've pretty much let them have their pick of the crop for games willing to bend over backwards to be marketed on the big stage.
When Sony and MS were both there, they had 2 to choose from, and they could easily decline and go to the other platform if that suited them better. But now they can't. And developers aren't the ones choosing the platform to market with, publishers are.
So that's 1 point, and I think strategically Sony giving up E3 hurts them there on that one.
The other has to do with who goes to E3, not just who watches it. There are lot of developers who to go E3, a lot of people for the first time seeing each other's work, seeing what the other studios are working on. There's a lot of networking happening there as well. And on that front, once again, MS can control the narrative here. If they want to push game pass, they can get all the studios and publishers talking about game pass. If they want to push DXR, they can have a full stage of DXR titles and push that narrative to other studios as well.
Sony has given MS control to have a large influence over the industry by not having a counter response.
Under Andrew House, I don't think this would have happened. Sorry guys. Since Layton took over in Oct 2017, E3 2018 was a re-hash, PSX 2018 is cancelled, now E3 2019 is cancelled.
Their whole game pipeline has stalled, for whatever reason, but their games pipeline is perhaps their most important selling point here. They are, as far as I can see without being hyperbolic, playing catchup on features and services. And from what I read, the only reason people buy Playstation is because xbox has no games. Except when you're not announcing anything at all for as long as they will not be, that's not really a sign of games either.
No E3 or PSX means no talking about new important OS features. I guess there is nothing in the pipe there as well.
When Satya took over Balmer, and when Phil took over Mattrick. MS has swung around completely. In both direction and how they communicate. Leadership does matter a lot more than people give credit for.
The idea of Nintendo directs is great for things that are already announced, but not a great place to talk about _major_ services, games and feature announcements.
They can do that at PSX, sure. But PSX isn't where the industry collectively gets together and looks and discusses what's happening. The only 3P groups there are the ones that made backend deals with Sony. There's no mindshare for companies not tied into their marketing. And what if your title is releasing before PSX2019? Will call of duty really be announced at.. Blizzcon?
imo this was Sony's first major blunder of this generation. Either they got way too overconfident and some features kept popping up on Xbox side that they didn't think they needed until it was too late, thus the delay to their console. Or X1X is performing much better than they expected and they don't want to launch a unit that close in power to X1X and thus had to delay.
There are plenty of other shows as well; PGW, GamesCom, TGS..
