It's sad, but E3 is really a relic of a bygone era. In the 90s or early 2000s, you almost never saw media from unreleased games. The best you could hope for was a few screenshots in a magazine (and later a website) to tide you over, surrounded by illustrative writing by games journalists. E3 was there to inform retailers of what products were coming, motivate them to dedicate shelf space to sell them, and lastly to provide a concentrated pile of news for the mainstream media to disseminate. This is why for so long the keynotes/showcases were called "press conferences". You can even find some recorded videos from these older E3's where Nintendo and Sony are presenting pie charts and graphs in a fairly monotone cadence.
Today, with the ubiquity of Youtube, Twitch, and other ways of seeing game footage and content, E3 just became another marketing event. And it was an expensive one at that. Publishers and platform holders chafed at the fact that they would have to do a live stage show where gaffes and demo disasters could occur, and marketing departments hated the fact that all of their effort could be easily overshadowed by another company's big reveal. You saw Sony tap out even before the pandemic hit, opting for its own separate showcases where they could control the message and dominate the news cycle. That became the model that more and more companies decided to pursue.
I will miss it because it was a fun event in the middle of May (and later June) that gave you a nice preview of what cool stuff was coming later in the year. There are also some legendary moments from the live presentations over the year, ranging from Sony getting on stage and only stating the price of the Playstation (which could undercut Sega's Saturn by $100, after Sega had decided to rush it for a surprise launch that day) to J Allard introducing the world to the new paradigm of centralized online gaming in 2005.
It's sort of like the PC User Groups that were more or less rendered redundant by the internet. I remember going to the HAL-PC (Houston Area League of PC Users) monthly general meetings as a kid and there could easily be over a thousand people there when they'd do things like having Microsoft and Lotus come and present their latest versions of Excel/123 in a "shootout". There were great door prizes, too. The internet came and there just wasn't a need for that anymore. It's kind of a shame, though, just because it felt like a real community thing.
Yeah, broadband basically killed the LAN party scene as well.
As a teenager my friends and I got into hosting occasional LAN parties. The very first were so we could play Doom deathmatch over serial connections lol. But anyhow it was something I really liked.
When I moved halfway across the country I didn't know anyone. I googled around and found the local major LAN parties. I went to one that was hosted every couple of months in a union hall, with around 200 attendees. At the first one I ended up sitting next to a group of chill folks, and they let me know they did their own dozen person party every other Saturday.
So I started attending that, and it resulted in several life long friendships. We've all changed, grown, moved, had kids, etc but most of us are still in touch. Even for the folks that moved away we meet up every summer or two and do a canoe camping trip or such.
Now, to be fair, I've made life long friends purely on the internet as well, but I do miss those old LAN party days. It was a lot of fun staying up until dawn playing rocket arena et all over and over.
Also to be fair the LAN parties were not hospitable to women, especially the larger ones. On the rare occasion they did try it out they'd get hounded by the least socially aware idiots in the room, and no one else really did anything about it (including myself, as I didn't understand these dynamics at that age).
These days with discord and everything some of that vibe is back in the purely online context, but still I don't think there will ever really be anything like those in person events.
Yeah, we never taped anyone to the ceiling but that was very much the vibe of our regular little 12 person group. The host lived at his parents house (college student) and they had an addition on the side of the garage that we packed into.
A big deal for us was pooling money to buy a 24 port 10 mbit switch back when those were new and fancy. Such a huge improvement over having to shut down the whole party and redo coax connections because one person in the middle of the line wanted to leave early.
We had women at our LAN parties in the 2000s, usually GFs or girls from the friend group. Not many played games so they'd just hang out and socialise amongst themselves or maybe play a console if there was one. So much fun.
Yeah, the only woman that showed up to that smaller dozen person regular event was my gf. Once.
I kinda understated what I was saying in the above because I didn't wanna get hounded by the basement dweller crowd, but the reality at the bigger events was pretty ugly. The only girl that ever showed up was the daughter of one of the organizers. Only a couple women showed up otherwise.
One story I can mention is from a different party I went to in a town not far away. This was a big bigger of an event, around 300 people and only run once a year. I only recall a woman showing up once.
That event held a 1v1 quake tourney with a modest cash prize. This woman was good. She smoked everyone easily. This was a bit of a shock because a couple people at that event had competed at quakecon and such.
The entire time she was at the event there was this mob surrounding her PC of... well, imagine the least socially aware and hygienic dudes that would show up to an early 00's LAN party. Didn't matter what she was doing or trying to play, they endlessly pestered her and tried to chat her up. If she walked across the room to get a coke you could see half the room openly staring at her turning their heads. Stuff like that.
Unsurprisingly she didn't return for the second day or any future event.
it's truly sad. i keep waiting for a trend reversal where people would instead prefer real life interaction because everyone's exhausted by the soulessness of zoom & screens. i really think it's coming, but i keep miscalculating when
> it's truly sad. i keep waiting for a trend reversal where people would instead prefer real life interaction because everyone's exhausted by the soulessness of zoom & screens. i really think it's coming, but i keep miscalculating when
I don't think this is a "trend," so much as the environment changing in unhealthy ways that we're not adapted for.
It's like a tree whose seeds will only germinate if the ground is just the right conditions, if the climate changes and those conditions no longer occur, it's not all the sudden going to start making seeds that germinate in other conditions. It's just going to fail to reproduce.
If the past, there was a lot more necessity to going out of the house, which has a lot of important side-effects, because you couldn't accomplish certain goals any other way. Technology provides easier and more isolating ways of achieving those goals, removing the necessity of going out. Now the needed side-effect are activities that require will, but people aren't set up as well to pursue them directly. That means most people won't do them or won't do them as consistently.
An example is exercise. Everyone got enough when there was no option except to walk everywhere. Now it's an option, so people are much less healthy due to lack of exercise.
I went to a bar last week, it was like a sports bar except the TV screens were hooked up to consoles and the patrons were playing Mario cart etc, with more dedicated spaces upstairs on a mezzanine including a few PCs
It's happening here, where I'm at (smallish city in the PNW). I've started going to a near-weekly board game meetup where we inevitably talk about more than games (computers, sometimes news of the day). It's not a large group but it's about the same size as the Linux/UNIX groups I participated in a few decades ago.
You basically don't attend the public sessions at events to learn things you couldn't learn otherwise. At least keynotes are almost always streamed and companies give out very little in the way of datasheets and other printed information which is all available online anyway.
Yeah, there are breakout sessions, and they're a good way to have some focused time on something you're interested in. But anyone who regularly goes to conferences will tell you it's mostly about the hallway track.
I think it's trending that way, but there are still going to be niche interest groups where you're almost certainly not going to have enough other members in your geographic vicinity to have in-person meetings. In the 1990s if you lived in a 10,000 person town you'd be lucky to find 4 other people in your age group with such niche interests as, say, personal computers or video games. Obviously those two things are quite widespread now, but there are new things that are just as niche as those once were.
I lived near a town of less than 2000 in the 90s and there were a lot more than 4 people in my age group who played video games. I had four kids in my class who were into computers enough to reinstall Windows, set up networks, and swap ISA/AGP/PCI cards with each other. I lived near a bigger "city" of 30,000 that had swap-meets and 200 person LAN parties, though I think they might have only gotten 50 or 60 participants in the mid-90s.
Might have been different for different age groups though.
IRL events similar to E3 are still happening but worldwide and at a smaller scale. For example John Romero attended such an even in my insignificant EU country. It was awesome and not as expensive as E3 but of course much smaller so it couldn't cover as much as E3.
There are still meetups of various sorts but I don't really disagree. The days of the Boston Computer Society having offices and renting out Symphony Hall to have Steve Jobs basically do a reprise of the NeXT launch are long gone.
This happened a lot. 2600 Magazine had locations for meet ups with ones fellow hackers. I, personally, wrote in and had them remove 2 locations, since people stopped showing up to them after the evolution of information we're in now.
Ironic, imo. It all started with BBSes, turned into personal meets, then went right back to digital, because of ease of use and features not supported with the BBS style of community.
The awards are for games that have come out over the past year. But they're juxtaposed by trailers and announcements for new games that will release in the next year or two.
To be fair, it's really the inverse - it's a majority trailer/announcement showcase with some video game awards in the middle.
It really isn't though. The video game awards are pretty huge. It just wasn't managed well.
This is more a product of Sony & Microsoft not only buying all the studios but also then wanting to have their own showcases and not have compete with each other on stage.
To me this all kind of started back in E3 2013 when the PS4 & Xbox One were being unveiled.
The pandemic probably didn't ultimately change a lot of things as much as people thought it would early on. But there are certainly events that were stumbling along, mostly on momentum, that didn't make it to the other side.
It impacted E3 a bit more than some of the others because they were attempting to pivot from Vendor facing to public facing and compete against established Cons like Gamescon or PAX and the pandemic blew up any momentum they had. It was the interception of their hail mary to save the show.
Apple has so much in-house video production skill and so many more people want to watch Apple events than could possibly be accommodated in person. What's the point of jamming a crowd into the Yerba Buena Center or wherever when most people will be watching streaming anyway and you have so much more control over the results that way?
I feel the same way. The new Apple videos are supremely well-produced. Of course there's something special about the absolute best of those live presentations (Jobs' original iPhone announcement is an all-timer), but there are way more live presentations that are far from memorable.
I feel the opposite. I can't stand the slick recorded Apple launch videos. They feel very corporate and soulless. I bet they do an endless amount of takes.
I can't stand the all the CGI that started to occur after COVID. I want to go back to the old school presentations. Like one second you are seeing the Apple Park then next second it is flying 10 stories down into some secret sterile bunker out of a video game or something.
Watching it live just feels better. Go back and watch one where they do it live and one where it does it pre-recorded. Something just feels off with the pre-recorded one.
By live i mean they are doing the presentation on the spot, not live as in person BTW.
Jobs did have a penchant for making a live demo feel natural. With anyone else, it just doesn't feel the same. I much prefer the pre-recorded videos now.
Steve was great at it, but maybe all it takes is for the presenter to be passionate about the thing they are presenting.
Elon is a terrible live speaker and yet I think his keynotes are pretty good. Also, we've all made fun of Steve Ballmer, but he was good at this as well.
Meanwhile, listening to Tim or Sundar is much less captivating. Perhaps if Tim could do a presentation about optimizing supply chains he would do much better than when he's at presenting iPad games.
> Steve was great at it, but maybe all it takes is for the presenter to be passionate about the thing they are presenting.
I claim to be a (rather trivial) counterexample to this hypothesis. I do claim that I am quite passionate about things that I am presenting - but this does not make me a good presenter or speaker.
>Elon is a terrible live speaker and yet I think his keynotes are pretty good.
Can you give a good example?
The Cyber truck unveil comes to mind as one of his worst, he clearly did not even look at the slides before going on stage as he says one thing and the slide has some completely different topic on it. If anything the glass break was the saving grace of the presentation. At least they got a meme out of it.
The Cyber truck delivery event was him stuttering over a couple videos making it up as he went along, then awkwardly handing over keys (its as if they didn't think about the flow of the vehicles coming on to and going off the stage) and then thats a wrap. Lets not talk about how he is always 30+ minutes late. Does this sound like a guy who gives even an ounce of care?
When the Model 3 delivery event occurred he was going through the breakup with Amber Heard so last second he ordered a switch to some bullshit song that he felt represented his relationship with Heard. I'm sure they have gone through a countless number of marketing people. Hell they had the guy that helped design Apple stores and even he left in 2013.
His presentations are a complete insult to the Jobs era presentations, hell they don't even come close to anything "Tim Apple"™ produces.
He always makes the excuse that "we are more concerned with making the best product so we dont waste time prepping for the presentation". Well Apple can make excellent polished products AND put consistent minimum effort into their presentations.
Ok I get it, its just a presentation for some capitalist company so what?
There was an old philosophy that Jobs used to talk about in his biography about how the truly passionate craft maker takes enormous pains to ensure that when making an item, it is made with beauty and care both outside where everyone can see but also both inside where no one will ever look. Think of the company itself as an item, Apple definitely still has this mentality, just look at how components are laid out in their product teardowns. Look at how they try to polish everything about the company brand, image, store designs specific to each city etc. I admire this thinking and try to aspire to it in my life but Musk is a complete insult to that type of thinking.
I remember when different magazines would get different exclusive screenshots for the PS2's Spiderman 2, and I would log in every single day to a BBS forum in the internet cafe to see if someone had uploaded the screenshot.
Today, with the ubiquity of Youtube, Twitch, and other ways of seeing game footage and content, E3 just became another marketing event. And it was an expensive one at that. Publishers and platform holders chafed at the fact that they would have to do a live stage show where gaffes and demo disasters could occur, and marketing departments hated the fact that all of their effort could be easily overshadowed by another company's big reveal. You saw Sony tap out even before the pandemic hit, opting for its own separate showcases where they could control the message and dominate the news cycle. That became the model that more and more companies decided to pursue.
I will miss it because it was a fun event in the middle of May (and later June) that gave you a nice preview of what cool stuff was coming later in the year. There are also some legendary moments from the live presentations over the year, ranging from Sony getting on stage and only stating the price of the Playstation (which could undercut Sega's Saturn by $100, after Sega had decided to rush it for a surprise launch that day) to J Allard introducing the world to the new paradigm of centralized online gaming in 2005.