Flogging the Dead Horse
… starring E3 as the dead horse.
Before I begin, I must admit, I didn’t look too much into E3 this year, I was too busy enjoying myself over in Queensland on a well-deserved holiday (which is why I haven’t been updating this blog). But it seems a large portion of the Interwebs are stating to believe what I have believed for years now, and that is that E3 is dead.
Suprising? No. With all the shit that has been happening to the Electronic Software Association, those happy people who run E3 and who are supposed to represent the software publishers in their fight against anus-heads like Jack Thompson, it’s no suprise that this E3 was going to suck harder than Courtney Love trying to get out of a drug fine. It was forebode by the unceremonious ship jumpings of Activision and LucasArts. They probably saw something going wrong months ago. The lack of support by large companies, the general dismissive attitude of the public after the ESA spat in their faces by saying that E3 was going to be down-sized and the lack of press releases from companies begging people to see what they have in store at E3 kinda painted a bad picture of this year’s E3. And it didn’t disappoint the people who bet on that outcome.
The biggest announcement for me was the Wii MotionPlus, a pack to rectify what the Wii Remote was meant to have in the first place, full 1:1 motion control. And even that isn’t that big an announcement… it’s just Nintendo trying to cover their asses. That shows you how crap E3 was this year.
What is amusing me the most is the hypocrisy of two of the groups which wanted E3 downsized the most, and that is the game publishers and game journalists. The latter were disappointed by the lack of new information to report about and the lack of hype leading up to it. The former were disappointed by the general disorganisation, a lack of audience when making their keynotes and just general wishing of the old E3 to return. Ironic then that the game journalists used to whinge about not being able to report as much on E3 due to having to fight with the public to get to E3 booths and the game publishers and developers had to spend a couple of months preparing a booth for that year’s E3. You guys destroyed E3 as we know it, now suffer the consequences quietly please as you guys ruined it for the rest of us.
I really don’t think that the ESA will revert back to the old E3 format, no matter how much the public, the press and the publishers want it back, so… RIP E3.
