E3 2021 is over.
E3 is over.
E3 is no longer fit for purpose.
Despite all that, E3 2022 is planned to return to Los Angelas as the in-person convention event that it was before the Wu Flu. For reasons that have nothing to with the Commie Coof, this needs to be shot down now, and the biggest reason as to why comes straight out of Japan: Nintendo Direct.
This is what actually needs to be done. You put together a title card, one trailer after the next complete with street dates and retail prices, and you slap on an outro card. All together, this should take no more than 30 minutes; Nintendo's goes longer due to adding things that don't need to be there, like people playing presenters and occassional dev bits, that pad things out. This is cheap, this is even easier than Nintendo's way of doing it, and Nintendo already shows that you can do this quarterly or so without breaking a sweat or straining the meager budget.
The momentum, believe it or not, is already going this way. Capcom's slowly adopting this format. XBox will follow, and once that happens the preference cascade kicks off and everyone will do it in a few years. The E3 hour-or-so showcase with all its useless bullshit is done; corporate beancounters, looking to cut costs, will see the superior efficiency of the Direct model and demand the leadership to push the format shift- and they will to get those sweet bonuses.
The resistance will come from the oversocialized and underskilled (i.e. Death Cultists), as they thrive in useless PR and Marketing positions; they are already openly converting E3 panel time to push their propaganda overtly, and they want that to continue. They do not yet realize that they do not have a monopoly of attention--that folks can just shut them off and watch something else--and when they finally realize it the mood will make Veruca Salt's tantrums look tame.
The Nintendo Direct model cuts all of that useless fat out, which means they are out of a job, and soon they'll realize this across the board. You will know the word is out when all the journos push coordinated hit-pieces on the practice with all the usual Death Cult word magic being cast at them like the desperate witches they are. There won't be enough spaces at the useless and collpasing journo scene to give them all sinecures, so watch as hilarity ensues.
Meanwhile, AAA in the West continues its collapse projectory as more and more totally-not-games keep getting pushed. It's spreading into AA and indie; a lot of total trash got air time this year, and the usual tells apply: soyface, dangerhair, pronouns, punchable smugness, lack of useful skills. It's not absolute yet, but it's really bad; the odds of a Western game being trash is over 2-in-3, while a Japanese game (aside from mobile trash; all mobile is trash) is no worse than 50-50.
And the Western studios wonder why their audience prefer Japanese games to what they offer most of the time, same as their counterparts in comics books and traditional book publishing.
The time has come. Put the pillow on them, then roll them out the door. We don't need them anymore. We need the Direct model.
E3 wasn't fit for purpose fucking 4 or 5 years ago, which is about when I stopped watching it.
ReplyDeleteIts fitness died way back, but now the corpse is so rotted nobody can ignore it.