E3, the gamers Christmas, is the time of year when the biggest companies in gaming come together to show their biggest and best games for the upcoming year. Traditionally these conferences are awkward acts, trying to get gamers to be excited for a product they probably don’t want; with a few actual moments of hype and excitement for a game. Companies pour millions of dollars into these conferences trying to be entertaining, all the while attempting to plug their new games, but Sony may have shown the way for a streamlined and more effective conference.
Like in the majority of the advertisements we receive on a daily basis; it usually comes off as flat and disconnected. The big gaming companies will pull lead developers out of their studios to speak on stage at E3 and more often than not, these people tend to not be great public speakers. Other times they’ll get celebrities to participate, and a strong majority of the time they are not gamers and don’t know the product. What gamers get is a wonderful mess of exciting games (what they want) with traditional corporate buzz talk (what they don’t). Company CEO’s and COO’s (and whatever other types of company heads there are), come out and say: (Company Name) is leading the gaming industry in innovation and blah blah blah. They start speaking in that cold calculated business jargon, that the majority of people have learned how to identify and tune out.
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Any average hardcore gamer is especially good at identifying these moments. Go to YouTube and search for awkward or embarrassing E3 moments and you can find hundreds of videos from the past few years, highlighting the most famous cringe worthy moments of E3. And that has generally been the basis for telling how well an E3 conference went. How many times was the viewer focused and excited about the games, instead of the actual presentation? Companies have realized this too. Nintendo doesn’t even have a traditional E3 press conference anymore, opting instead for short online presentations throughout the year. After the disaster that was the Nintendo 2012 E3 press conference, (Nintendo failed to create a strong launch lineup for the Wii U and differentiate it from the Wii) Nintendo realized how inefficient of a format the traditional E3 conference can be. Not every year will a company have a great lineup of games to show off, leaving space for more awkward moments and gamer criticism.
The other major companies stayed with the format, but Sony did something different with it this year. Sony made E3 about something that should have been obvious from the get-go. They made it all about the games. Opening with a live orchestra (that played music live with each demo!) in a much more elegant theatre than usual, Sony essentially told the audience, this isn’t your typical conference. Starting with God of War and continuing trailer after trailer, with only a few breaks in between. Only three people ever came on stage. Sony realized they didn’t need to speak for their games, because the games already did that themselves. Sony crafted an E3 that showed one high-quality game after another, each with a level of polish that seemed like it was going to be one of the best games ever made. It most likely may have been the greatest conference in E3 history. When the lowest moment of the night is a Crash Bandicoot tie in with Skylanders and that’s it; you know you’ve got a hard one to beat.
Hopefully Sony will continue with this style of E3 and hopefully others will follow. It may have just been that the stars aligned this year and they had a strong enough line up to do something like this. Maybe next year they’ll have a more traditional conference, but I doubt it. Sony seemed to be very deliberate in the way they performed this year, and they will probably keep this style for years to come.
