E3 was a horrible, loud, expensive nightmare - but there was doubtlessly a magic about it. Thinking about it gives me a bloody headache, but it’s a nostalgic headache - and I will forever mourn that old, mad format. It ain’t ever coming back - but this week, I think we got a glimmer of what the future could and probably should look like.
I’ve just spent the week in Los Angeles attending ‘Summer Game Fest’, which in this article doesn’t just refer to the event that Geoff Keighley laid on, but all of the broader activities around LA. For the sake of argument, let’s call it ‘new E3’. Keighley’s event is sort of the tentpole that draws others in, with LA this week a host to the SGF stage show and stream, the ‘Play Days’ campus where many publishers set up shop, a similar offering from our colleagues over at IGN Live, plus separate events spaces from Ubisoft and Xbox.
Other publishers camped up in hotel rooms for top-secret hands-ons and the like. None of this amounts to what E3 was. But it does feel like something is emerging from the cloud left behind by E3’s inauspicious immolation.
And what’s emerging...
is sort of quite good? Some of this is likely to be a bit inside baseball, a bit business-to-business - but I think it’s worth talking about, as I know some of you are deeply interested in how the industry works. So let’s do just that, yeah? From my perspective, that of a veteran of a decade’s worth of E3s, countless Gamescoms, and so on, the .