The Annual E3 General Discussion press conference thread, 2018 edition

Teenagers have allowances and young adults below 30 have disposable income too.
We're talking about $50-70 videogames, not $40k cars.

 

yea I know. It's not unreasonable to think there are other demographics, just a lot of money in the 30-50 year old demographic.

 

From Software isnt a Sony studio as far as I know

 

I didn't watch the show and only went by comments as to what people saw.

Sales of HZD and GOW and PS4 consoles. It's something like 7 million HZD sold to 70 million PS4 owners. These AAA blockbuster titles are a small niche. All games are a small niche except a very few rare exceptiions. that's why library diversity matters, as per the Importance of Exclusives' discussion.

Nothing wrong with 4 big exclusives. What's wrong IMO is not showing a compelling library that has a decent chunk of something for everyone. But again, maybe it was a very specific message for the audience Sony thinks they have at E3?

How many of those games features in the conference?

 

I can understand the idea of trying out a different e3 format, with less content, no filler 3rd party multi-plats or bs timed-launch exclusive, but taking more time and going more in-depth in what you show. But unfortunately, that's not what sony did. They still dedicated more time tha I expected to games xbox will also get anyway, and their big blockbuster titles got the same kind of short "theatrical" gameplay demos they'd get on the regular shows.
I would understand dedicating an event mostly to 4 big AAAA (I'm calling them quadruple A) with only short trailers for the smaller stuff, but these big games ahould have gotten more love then. I wanted to see the devs step in and talk about the game mechanics live as they played and demonstrated. They should have given some 20 damn minutes for each game. So they could have the trailer, the live dev demo, the cinematic gameplay demo, and more. Instead we got a blatant repeat of the same live music act gimick to set the tone they had already used when they first demoed TLOU1 for ps3. Just very uncreative and boring. And yeah, I think some more light hearted casual-luke games in between the big ones would probably balance the pacing better. Give the audience some intermintant High and Low emotional intensity moments. Create that rollercoaster ride.
MS did the exact oposite. Their presentation was perfectly crafted, just the content was mostly non-exclusive or just not as earth-shattering as some of the incredible stuff sony's studios are doing. The actual important stuff: Gears and Halo, had no gamelay whatsoever.
Bethesda was the best one in my opinion. And I am not even that into most of their games, but I can recognise they had the most stuff worth setting up a full press event to show off than the rest.

 

GOW and HZD don't cater to the exact same audience. They are very different games with very different story settings, gore/violence levels, narrative, etc.
Proof of that is GOW surpassed 5 Million in a month whereas HZD sold 3.4 million in three months. Their purchase correlation is very far from 1:1. HZD ended up selling 7.6 million in one year, so GOW will probably do closer to 15 million than HZD's 7.6 million.

And if we go for the 4 big exclusives presented this E3 the differences are even larger.

Isn't this a self-defeating argument?

All of the ones I listed were shown in the conference. They're in the PSVR reel I linked above and I simply omitted the ones that are already released.

 

Which is why my back-of-the-envelope stats allowed for 25% of the market to be interested in these AAA titles - it's still a small niche.

I don't know what this means.

Okay. No mention of this anywhere that I've seen in general coverage although I haven't gone looking. So Sony's other focus is very much VR.

 

Not really, they can't abandon it, but they also aren't focusing on it. Outside of one title, the collaboration with From Software, they deliberately left PSVR out of their main conference, unlike last year or the year before where it was one of the main focuses of the show.

Hard to say if they are just coasting on it until something changes, or they are working on a way to refocus how they want to present VR to consumers.

Regards,
SB

 

I'm confused. In the conference, was there just one VR game shown or were there lots?

 

there was an after conference piece. where they talked about more games with just a small group of people and guests

 

Question : What is the point to E3? What is its purpose, especially regards the console manufacturers when they haven't got hardware to talk about? Is it one of many marketing opportunities to present a particular choice message? Is it focussed on a particular sector of gamers? Is it supposed to showcase the platform as a whole for the coming year?

I don't know what the answer is, and it seems some of the console companies don't either. The original reason for E3 doesn't exist any more thanks to the Interwebz, so should it and can it maintain any meaningful purpose, or is it a dinosaur ripe for extinction?

 

So ToTTenTranz wasn't being accurate. This discussion is about the message Sony presented in their conference that contributors sat and watched. The reason I and the rest talked about only 4(ish) games and didn't account for the numerous VR titles is because we weren't informed about them, because Sony chose not to share that info in their conference. Karamazov's remark that there was only one PSVR title wasn't wrong - Sony didn't make a song and dance about it. Despite having ample time and all eyes on them.

 

This basically, although more than just a message. It's the games. It was more important back in the days when most consumers got their information from print publications. Game companies showed their games to various media entities that then distributed it to their reader base.

Now, it's a way to easily showcase a bunch of titles to a large internet audience. While some developers question its importance or if it's even needed now, it's still the one time of the year when you can basically guarantee a large audience.

That's especially important for more obscure titles. Of course everyone is going to know about the BIG AAA games. But it's much harder to get the word out about smaller AAA games or high A games outside of their existing fan bases.

For example, without E3, Cuphead may have died in obscurity or just lived with a small niche following. Microsoft showcasing them at one of their conferences massively increased general gamer interest in the game overnight.

That also applies to larger publishers that are fostering more creative internal smaller projects (high A or published indie).

Of course, there are now other events (like PAX or Comicon) where companies can showcase their games, but E3 remains one of the major ones (along with the TGS and the one in Germany that I can't remember the name of).

Regards,
SB

 

What the hell is a "song and dance"? They announced two new VR titles and showed more in the prep E3 recap and montages. We all know VR doesn't show particularly well in video so deep dives would be a poor format anyway.

 

VR is in a weird place right now. This years E3 is now the first time I'm starting to see former VR cheerleaders now seeing a VR game that looks promising (Insomiac's Stormland specifically) and saying they hope there is a non-VR version so they can play the game. Also saw another hoping that their favorite franchise (in this specific case the new Fallout game) doesn't get the VR treatment.

But it's not dead. One of the people wishing for a non-VR version of Stormland mentioned they were willing to give the VR live action interactive game by UBIsoft a try.

It's weird. I'm used to seeing people grow disillusioned with the state of VR, but this is the first time I've actually seen hostility towards VR in games. Even more so that it isn't coming from people that didn't want VR in the first place. But coming from people that REALLY wanted VR.

Regards,
SB

 

"Song and dance" means 'tell people about it with some marketing'. Why is it better for Sony to not afford 5 minutes in the press conference to show a sizzle reel of VR titles than to include that sizzle reel? "We've got these great games and are supporting our VR platform. Everyone is going to be watching us on 11th June. Let's not show these games." hence we have a thread where people say, "only one VR title? LOL," and now some bizarro discussion where apparently this didn't happen except it didn't but it doesn't matter because it's all good anyway. :?

 

I have to disagree if we only speak about the exclusive titles. They showed almost nothing, not only that, but their games seem far less ambitious in scope. When you look at Spiderman, it's basically a Hollywoodian movie.

Microsoft showed less gameplay and their games seemed less ambitious.

Microsoft was much better with their presentation but could not compete with Sony with the content.

If people disagree, let's wait for the view count on Youtube... we all know what will happen... and it's not only because Sony has more players, because the difference usually far exceeds the 2/1 ratio in actual sales.

 

I think the major problem is space just like it was with the kinnect. VR is amazing if you have the room for it. In the spring / summer I bring my pc outside at my parents and they have a 3 car garage and I will pull out their two cars and we basicly have 2 cars worth of space to play vr in (they have a ton of junk in the other car space) and its amazing. But the rest of the year i'm stuck in a small play space in my extra room .

I think if next gen vr is like half dome it will get more people interested , very little screen door , large FOV and eye tracking for better performance might be what does it.

 

Why would it not have to do with Sony having more players ? Wouldn't those people want to see what sony is announcing ? Seems like a silly metric.

Spiderman looked great sure but its coming out soon and we have seen it for over year now. That makes a great show ?

 

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