Here's the thing - E3 was for the press, retailers and bigwigs way back when the 16-bit era was starting to wrap up, the internet was still crawling out of the deepest dankest depths of DARPA, and CD-ROM titles were starting to come out of the woodwork, it was NEVER meant to be Gamerpalooza 20xx, and it wasn't until recently that developers and publishers realized they didn't need to waste a good chunk of their mark-o-bucks on fancy glorified staged commercials which could've been spent putting Mr. CoDnite (or whatever's hip now, I'm old) on bags of cheese chips when they could just day-bomb their YT channels with the reveals for big games and get equal response
Another thing was that back in that era - it wouldn't be a challenge to pop out a few demo versions for a few key games, but now with the massive time, resources, and money it takes to make a Triple A game, it'd take time out of the schedule.
And why do a once-a-year media event when you can have five teaser trailers, three exclusive gameplay cuts, a sneak peek video, an announce trailer, an announce video, four exclusive videos, five developer interview videos, then three more trailers, a gameplay trailer and an HD trailer?
This, it made sense in '96 when a majority of the gaming press were magazines and such, and the online players were just starting to show up toting around their fancy new AOL keywords and Shockwave-animated intro pages, but now the game's changed.
Here's the thing - E3 was for the press, retailers and bigwigs way back when the 16-bit era was starting to wrap up, the internet was still crawling out of the deepest dankest depths of DARPA, and CD-ROM titles were starting to come out of the woodwork, it was NEVER meant to be Gamerpalooza 20xx, and it wasn't until recently that developers and publishers realized they didn't need to waste a good chunk of their mark-o-bucks on fancy glorified staged commercials which could've been spent putting Mr. CoDnite (or whatever's hip now, I'm old) on bags of cheese chips when they could just day-bomb their YT channels with the reveals for big games and get equal response
Another thing was that back in that era - it wouldn't be a challenge to pop out a few demo versions for a few key games, but now with the massive time, resources, and money it takes to make a Triple A game, it'd take time out of the schedule.
And why do a once-a-year media event when you can have five teaser trailers, three exclusive gameplay cuts, a sneak peek video, an announce trailer, an announce video, four exclusive videos, five developer interview videos, then three more trailers, a gameplay trailer and an HD trailer?
This, it made sense in '96 when a majority of the gaming press were magazines and such, and the online players were just starting to show up toting around their fancy new AOL keywords and Shockwave-animated intro pages, but now the game's changed.