Summer Game Fest – it’s no Electronic Entertainment Expo (Picture: The Game Awards)

GameCentral offers its thoughts on this year’s Summer Game Fest and why it has a long way to go before it truly replaces E3.

We always get very frustrated with fellow journos who complain about not liking E3 and celebrate its demise, since they’re usually the same loafers that whine about having to get up early for it and treat a convocation of the entire video game industry, in a single location, as merely a hardship to be endured. We always loved it though, with the chance to meet gaming’s great and good – many of whom never appear in public at any other time – and go hands-on with all the latest games.

It’s equally frustrating to hear publishers talking it down and pretending it’s somehow no longer relevant, when the real reason they let it die is because they didn’t like sharing the limelight with their competitors and paying for expensive stands. No doubt organisers ESA should shoulder a lot of the blame too, since they seem to have annoyed almost everyone at some point (including journos whose private details they managed to leak online) but everyone that contributed to its downfall deserves a portion of the blame.

Sony was the first to stop going and then the pandemic hit and it became impossible to get anyone to agree to be in the same place with each other. We miss E3 because of the spectacle and the fact that everything was sensibly organised into a small space of time, where it was clear that every event was going to try its best to impress – as opposed to the jumble of unconnected showcases that have this year ranged from the occasionally interesting (Summer Game Fest) to the staggeringly misjudged (PlayStation Showcase).

It’s certainly not that we miss the free holiday, since writing up game previews at 5am in the morning, while trying desperately to get the hotel air conditioning to switch off, is not our idea of a fun vacation. And besides, we will be in L.A. this week anyway, despite the minimal amount of hands-on on interview opportunities on offer.

And that’s why we not only miss E3 but consider its demise to be a major detriment for gamers everywhere. Many fans complain that, post-pandemic, publishers are being too secretive and not announcing new games even though they’re clearly in development (Sony’s attitude in this regard is especially baffling) and then going years before showing anything significant about them.

It is now the norm for even the very biggest game to release without any significant hands-on or developer interviews. All of which was so easy to organise at E3. At most, a couple of the big American websites will publish an uncritical hands-on or an anodyne interview that does nothing but ask the developer why they’re so great and if they can please paraphrase the product description for them.

That’s not a criticism of the websites but of the publishers that are clearly imposing these restrictions on them. After all, games are still selling well, so why risk someone asking an awkward question? It’s always been the case that the only thing publishers are interested in once a game is announced is pre-orders, as they desperately try to get people to pay £60+ for a game about which they know next to nothing.

That was bad enough when previews and interviews were commonplace but now that they are not it comes across as deeply cynical, asking someone to pay large amounts of money based on nothing but a pre-rendered trailer and the promise of a trivial piece of cosmetic DLC.

Summer Game Fest, organised by The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley is doing its best, but the showcase on Thursday night was only occasionally interesting and notably lacking in major surprises (except for Sony turning up to make all the Spider-Man 2 announcements it for some reason refused to at its own event).

Watching an endless stream of trailers and adverts is not what E3 was about. That was, and still is, the norm for the pre-E3 showcases from Sony, Microsoft, and other publishers, but E3 itself was where you actually got to play the games and talk to the people that make them.

Keighley is trying to recreate that concept with Summer Game Fest, which does feature a small number of hands-on and interview opportunities, but it’s barely even a shadow of what E3 used to be.

There is a good chance that E3 will return at some point, or that Keighley will be able to morph Summer Game Fest into its more direct replacement, since this is not the first time publishers tried to kill it off. In 2007 publishers rebelled against spending money on the event and ended up moving it from the gigantic LA Convention Center to Santa Monica Airport, the number of attendees dropping from 60,000 to 10,00 – and then to 5,000 the year after.

At that point they realised that making the games industry look like some squalid plumber’s convention was not a good idea and they went back to the traditional format. It’s probably folly to imagine that will happen again but something needs to bring back the spirit of E3.

Something is needed to stop publishers from trying to ensure people know as little as possible about new games until after they’ve paid for them. And it wouldn’t hurt to see the games industry being publicly celebrated again, instead of each publisher deciding to take their ball home and refusing to speak to anyone else.

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GameCentral offers its thoughts on this year’s Summer Game Fest and why it has a long way to go before it truly replaces E3.