If there’s one thing worse than E3, it’s NotE3
They won’t, of course. They can’t. E3’s death was a long time coming, but I still think E3 could’ve held on as an anchor event had its organisers, the Entertainment Software Association not blown it when covid-19 hit.
But oh, the experience was so much worse. While I was glad to see several showcases dedicated to games which traditionally had little presence at E3, everything combined was all too much. Too many streams spread across too many weeks and each lasting too long. It was just too much. No one can enjoy two straight hours of adverts, especially when half of them were shown on another two-hour showcase the week before. It’s getting worse over subsequent years too, with streams growing longer and more self-indulgent while spreading across more of the summer. Only now do I appreciate the service E3 provided in focusing four months' worth of marketing into a single week.
E3 was also tolerable—even enjoyable!—because a dense concentration of marketing fosters spectacle. Big companies trying to grab attention and out-do each other created a ridiculous energy that’s absent from NotE3. The huge publishers are always going to waste money on bad marketing rather than things you’d actually like to see, like development budgets or avoiding layoffs, so I think the least they can do is make it spectacular. Or embarrassing. Or, as was often the case, both.
This is for selfish reasons, too. I miss E3 as a member of the games media. I never attended E3 because despite a Catholic upbringing, even I don’t believe I deserve that punishment. But I did cover it remotely for a decade, watching streams and reading press releases and writing until 5am only to get up at 9 and start all over again. It sucked to outright lose a week of my life, remembering nothing I’d seen or done, but at least it was a one-off (and to be fair, that is probably about the level of punishment I deserve). While E3 was exhausting, I wasn’t spending innumerable evenings and weekends watching hours-long streams which turn out to offer little to write about. God, to think all this once took only a week!
