The Annual Is this the worst E3 Ever? [2017 Edition]

Probably started as soon as Phil was put in charge. It's a pretty big effort to develop a custom SOC like that and all the software tools to go around it.

 

I generally don't watch them, just read the announcements and watch the videos.

I was disappointed in the fact I was expecting one of the three:

1. New Sucker Punch game
2. Bloodborne 2
3. Demon Souls remaster

Of course E3 is not the end all of announcements, there are many game conferences, including Sony's own in December.

 

This would get my vote for the worst E3 I can remember. At least as far as excitement goes. At least the debacles of the past could be entertaining or informative. They do seem to be slowly (not counting EA) moving away from the paid C list, youtube celebrity shit. For the most part. Small favors.

Well, short impressions for each. I watched everything but Nintendo. I am not a Nintendo fan so it is pointless to tack an opinion of mine onto their products. Just not my bag. I was trying to not be overly critical, but I think I failed so....

Worst of Show: PC Gamer

I actually turned this one off about 2/3rds of the way through after I realized I had stopped watching for 20 minutes. About the most exciting thing I saw was that contest for a free high-end PC. This bored me to tears. Want to give PC Gaming a pass due to its nature? Ok.

Honorable mention for worst: EA.

Really, after watching the EA conference I thought it could only go up from there. Guess I was half-right. Someday EA will learn that the E3 crowd and press are not really the audience to spend 20+ minutes showing various sports titles to. Need for Speed? When did this game become a video game knock off version of XxX/ Fast and the Furious? I'll just tap the car next to me and it will go flying off into the distance in a little cutscene which will completely throw off uour driving rythm before your attention is drawn back to some of the worst dialogue since the Kinect reveal show all those years ago. A Way out? forced co-op game? That's all I need to know. Pass. Now let's tell everyone we actually added a single player campaign to Battlefront 2, but then show nothing of it and spend 30 minutes banging on about the PvP followed by more cringe-worthy mobile game footage? Horrible show. Oh, and no Visceral Star Wars. I do not accept the excuse of "Not going to show 2 Star Wars games and detract from the one coming out soon." Horseshit/ Tough Shit. EA games come with a little asterisk in my head stating "Do NOT purchase new." Whenver I break that I am reminded of why I have the rule in the first place.

Biggest Disappointments:

1: The giant troll that was Bethesda and the whole Starfield thing. Has no one even asked them about this? Where are my hard hitting game journalists damnit! (yes, sarcasm.) Speaking of Bethesda, they are turning into low rent Nintendo. Let's see how long we can release remasters of old content and keep selling them. That seems to be their strategy at this point.

2: Anthem. Yes, it was very, very pretty. If you always wanted to live out your Ironman fantasy, this looks like it could be for you. Gameplay looked pretty bland. Check that, it looked checkbox/ paint by numbers bland. I didn't see anything to get excited about gameplay wise and that concerns me.

3: The continued emphasis placed on eSports is just, disturbing? This just feels about as forced as anything could be. It reeks of "We want NFL money damnit!"

4: The lack of release dates for damn near everything not due out in the next 60-90 days.
best in show: (no caps used deliberately) Has to be Ubisoft. May my tongue turn black for saying it. This is more a victory by default. Everyone else seemed to have been bribed to take a dive. Is Skull and Bones just ship driving and PvP? If so, I can cross that one off pretty easily.

Sony: I think you succesfully crushed any interest I may have had in Detroit:BH. Congrats. Horizon: ZD DLC? I would say "YES!" but that was the least informative DLC trailer I may have ever seen. Days Gone - stop me if you've heard this one before. Monster Hunter: Well, it looks stupid but apparently it is a mobile game of some kind being brought into big pants land, rather well thought of, and just isn't my bag. Ok, fair enough. Shadows of the Colossus... the 2nd remaster? How many times do they think they can do this. Oh yeah, right, Nintendo. COD, couldn't care less, just a personal thing. PSVR - not touching any VR until the field of view is much better and they solve the first person nausea issue. Spiderman.. well, it was present I guess. And it had gameplay (kinda sorta).

MS: Eh. I liked the format but didn't care about the games. Nothing I saw would cause me to buy an Xbox or an Xbox X. Probably nothing was going to at this point. Too jaded. They get a bit of a pass simply because I expected so little. Ask and you shall receive I guess.

 

the best part of the Sony's conference is Spider-Man. What I didn't like of Sony's conference was how their message backlashes. BC is bad they say, yet they create another remaster.

 

So, the medias seem to have the same feeling than me : lack of exclusive titles from the MS side vs a pack of triple A exclusives from the Sony side. They don't especially say that the Sony conference was good, but just less worse than the MS one.

https://gearburn.com/2017/06/sony-or-microsoft-who-won-e3-2017/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidt...gain-by-doing-what-it-does-best/#28529ff86200

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/06/who-won-e3-2017/

 

Another indirect indicator might be the numbers of views per trailer : http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1391624

From a very fast count (only from the first page) :

Spiderman is well over 10 millions. It's the most viewed E3 trailer among all games* : https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=CAMSAggD&q=spider+man+ps4

God of War is close to 9 millions : https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=CAMSAggD&q=god+of+war

Days Gone is over 6 millions : https://www.youtube.com/results?q=days+gone&sp=CAMSAggD

I tried to exclude the videos commented by youtubers in my calculation and those that came after a conference.

Few games reached these numbers.

Battlefront is over 7 millions and well over 10 millions of views if you add all the gameplay videos. It was probably the real king of E3, but not from its trailer alone : https://www.youtube.com/results?q=battlefront+2&sp=CAMSAggD

Edit* : in fact it's AC Origins : https://www.youtube.com/results?q=assassin's+creed+origins&sp=CAMSAggD

 

It's a terrible metric to measure "this" year's E3 as it skews towards the PS4 audience considering it has the largest install base.

You'd expect PS4 owners to be viewing trailers for games coming to their system.

 

I thought the latest GT Sport footage looked better than Forza 7 and God of War running on a standard PS4 shows power is no substitute for skill and artistry which were lacking MS's AAA games.

 

True. There's a strong bias. But you can't put the low views of a game like Sea of Thieves on that alone.

Also, there are strong differences among PS4 games. For example, Knack 2 didn't do very well.

So, it's still a decent indicator although not a perfect one.

 

Should be able to apply a 2:1 ratio to viewing figures to see if games are comparable though. Something like Spider-Man is going to get views from people looking for the movie trailer though!

 

Why? It's fading and losing importance. Putting everything into one show in a break-neck event competing with everyone else's attention isn't necessarily the best way to do it. Just let E3 pass you by with everyone else fighting for attention, and then hold your own events with the whole world's eyes on you alone. Makes sense, and it's worked for Apple, doing their own thing instead of sharing the world Mobile stage.

E3 itself is no longer a must-do event. Ultimately Sony could have ridden the E3 train by buying a cheap ticket. Don't bother with a show, have a big booth for the foot-fall showcasing VR and stuff, and save your trailers and attention seeking for when the world's not too busy with too much going on.

(If it were me, I'd do crazy awesome fun stuff and get everyone talking, using the setting to one's PR advantage.)

 

An interesting conversation can be had about alternative ways to get messaging out or even whether or not E3 should be important but is it really debatable that E3 is the biggest show of the year?

For most people following the industry loosely it's the one they will tune in to get a rough idea about what the platform holders and big publishers are bringing over the year or so.

 

PSX is bigger now and the press coverage is good too. I don't think Sony is upset about E3 2017...

It is not like it was a bad conference, it was a solid one...

 

Multi platform games don't always get more views. Anthem has lower views than Gof of War for example. It's a new IP though, but Wolfenstein 2 got even lower views than Anthem.

In my opinion, some games simply have a stronger appeal on people, regardless the constructor.

 

Well it's wrong anyways, predictably. I just looked up every Battlefront 2 vid from the last week over 100k views vs every spiderman one, BF2 had like 15.5m views vs 14.5 for Spidey.

The gaffer used some weird criteria of course (top 3 viewed trailers for any game, but only if they were all over 100k, or something oddball). My method was just to count every vid of that game uploaded in the past week that had over 100k views (somewhat arbitrary threshold but, you have to put one somewhere). Note he lists "multiple sources" for the channel for every sony exclusive, but pretty much only a single source (IE, EA channel) for others amongst the top few.

Also for example the gaffer only counted "official Battlefront 2 E3 trailer", and ignored the over 2m views on jackfrags Battlefront 2 multiplayer video. I suppose you could make a case for this, but I think it's more fair, accurate and simple to judge interest by including all videos about the game over 100k views, regardless.

 

I understand why Sony was a bit quieter this year. Any real big news that they might have had, would have been drowned in the XBOX wave. So I can see how they might have kept some new games or big updates to themselves to be revealed at PSX. There is limited press space at any given time and everyone knows that this week the press was all about the X, and to a certain extent the Switch.

Also, they've had a ridiculously good first half of the year, just one amazing game after the next, so it's also understandable if they relax a little.

To me that risks looking like arrogance - and maybe it is a bit, especially with the cross-play debacle.

But that's Sony for you. They'll reveal their cards when they know it's all about them.

 

Except it's not the place to learn that. Not when announcements are for games in 2018 and beyond. If you want to know what games are coming out, you keep track of trailers on YouTube etc. GDC and GamesCom and TGS and proprietary events give plenty enough coverage as well. I mean, if you want to single one out as the most important, yeah I'd give the nod to E3. But it's not important in itself. You could completely ignore E3 and yet get all the coverage you need elsewhere. It's no longer the must-do event.

 

http://www.gamereactor.eu/news/544933/Sony+considers+European+return+after+missing+last+Gamescom/

Sony will probably be at an european event this year Gamescom or Paris Game Week and they will be at TGS and organize PSX....

 

Maybe it's because these exclusives are for ps5.

Tgs normally gets some interesting debuts, psx is normally just a rehase of E3 with updated demos

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PS5 it is a bit early. Games liks Dreams and Wild games will probably have presentation during the european event.... And this is probably the reason no GT Sport trailer during the E3 conference only during the pre show... GT sales are huge in Europe...

And some japanese games during the TGS and maybe Sucker Punch teaser, TLOU2 gameplay and Death Stranding during PSX...