E3 is dead, but suits still need to get their fix for both their crippling gambling addiction and their exhibitionist fetish somewhere, so you know what time it is! It’s… a random weekend in June.

That’s right, with no real reason or cohesion to onlookers, this just happens to be the exact moment when all the executives could no longer hold it in and had to bust all over Twitch, which is much easier nowadays thanks to the camwhore apocalypse. As such, we have a fuckton of new trailers and other assorted trailer-like homunculi to pour over as the good little consumer piggies we are.

But the past few years, the ads have seemed increasingly unlikely to stir any excitement. Trailers are more cookie-cutter than ever, and actual gameplay reveals are a disappearing art. And much like last time when I complained about gaming news, all the developers actually making the games are mysteriously absent. Yes, you read that right, this blog has continuity now! Look forward to the blogomatic universe announcement later this year.

Looking back at E3s of old, these new events are cheaper, more condensed, more accessible and entirely controlled by the corporations and not vulnerable to the oh-so-familiar gaffes of live shows. Yet they still happen just as rarely as E3. Somehow the genius executives at the top have decided that, you know, instead of letting people know what’s happening more often and spreading the games accordingly to give them all room to breathe, we stuff even more crap into a shorter timespan and as a result nobody even remembers what we saw two days later.

Confoundingly we’ve decided that now gameplay reveals are also trailers. Both Perfect Dark and That Indiana Jones Thing Because Disney Has To Stay Relevant™ had “gameplay reveals”, but both were some sort of amalgamation of gameplay clips strung together and overlaid with the same piano-inception horn trailer music trash every other trailer was full of. Why even bother? Just cut out the middleman and show us a CGI video clip at that point for all the difference that makes.

I’m honestly a little confused about what all the suits even do all day. They’re paid exorbitant sums of money and all they can come up with is the same shit all their friends and THEMSELVES have been doing for years. Does the marketing team also double as the company’s cocaine quality assurance wing? Presumably the business school all these clowns come from is equally tilted in their goals, since I’d imagine “don’t immediately shoot your product in the foot” and “don’t make your product look as undesirable as possible” would rank fairly high on a business 101 class’ Don’t-Fuck-It-up-o-meter. Alongside wisdom like “don’t burn all your money like Heath Ledger in the Dark Knight”.

I feel the early onset Old Man Syndrome setting in again. Last time it was gaming magazines/news, this time it’s gaming events. There’s another one about marketing and gameplay gifs on social media that I think I’ll save for later. It’s a little frustrating that consistently I hit the same issues with the consideration of “it worked so much better before, what the fuck happened?”

Many complain about E3 et al. being just loaded advertising breaks, but the truth is, even in a moneyless society marketing would still be needed to let people know your artwork exists. A marketing campaign doesn’t just exist to sell you on something monetarily, but also timewise. Even if a game was free, the time commitment still means that you’ll filter out a lot of art unless you know it’s worth your time.

It’s a little disappointing that a theoretically better and more accessible system still makes me miss the haphazard cringefest that was E3, but a well oiled marketing machine also completely lacks the humanity that this medium so sorely needs right now. So please, bring it back. E3 needs to exist for this industry’s long term survival.

And also the E3 bingo cards. Those are the most important bit.