I realize the pandemic has been horrible, painful, and endlessly annoying, but I really like what it’s done for our premiere videogame trade show. Presentations are so much smoother now that publishers are focusing on the home audience rather than marketing to a crowd of hungover, overworked, jet-lagged journalists who are all fighting for a wi-fi signal in a deafening convention center.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It’s nice that presenters can get their requisite boilerplate “games are important” prattle out of the way without stopping for applause every ten seconds. The stream remains focused on the trailers I’m trying to watch and doesn’t keep cutting back to a convention hall of attendees that don’t matter to me. I think the presenters feel a little less pressure since they’re not looking out over a sea of faces, which means they’re a little more composed and a lot less wooden.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Old E3 was designed for a world before social media. A world where you needed to market to journalists, and then those journalists would write magazine articles, and then next month those articles would reach the intended audience. Now the intended audience can view your marketing directly, in real time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I hope we keep doing things this way, even when\/if we’ve given COVID the shove.<\/p>\n
The Ubisoft house style isn’t really my thing, so I don’t usually care about the Ubisoft show. But this year I had something to look forward to. You might remember that I made Watch Dogs Legion<\/i> my GOTY in 2020<\/a>. I was really into the game and I was eager to see what Ubisoft would do with the DLC.<\/p>\n