For those who are unfamiliar with it (though in this day and age it’s pretty hard to be), the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3, for short) is a week-long gala where developers show off their upcoming products to consumers. Typically there’s one big press conference for each of the big developers – Microsoft, Nintendo, EA, Sony, so on and so forth – with tons of booths holding demos, previews, or smaller presentations. It has become a massive event that even garners attention from major news outlets like CNN and MSNBC, and helps to build a lot of hype for upcoming games.
But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.
A consistent problem which people are noticing at E3 is that developers are not being consistent with their products; rather than actually show what the game is going to be like when we, the consumers, get ahold of it, developers often resort to playing incredibly brilliant trailers, treating the game like a movie rather than an actual video game. Several years ago, the developers for Dead Island played a trailer that promised an emotional, thought-provoking take on the zombie apocalypse; instead, what gamers got was a buggy, slash’em’up zombie shooter that had none of the emotional pull from the trailer. Or, even worse, developers remain inconsistent in their promises about what will actually be available for their products; last year not even Microsoft seemed to know what the Xbox One was going to require or be capable of doing.
The issue here is that, somewhere along the line, developers have decided that all they need to do at E3 is build hype for the product rather than to actually show gamers what they are actually going to be getting when they download the game or buy it off the shelves. Rather than to actually say how things are actually going to be, they pander to the audience; part of the problem with the Xbox One controversy was that Microsoft changed their statement on the “always-online” policy after an incredibly negative backlash, but made numerous inconsistent statements that made it difficult for anyone to discern what was actually true and what was just them trying to save face.
Now, that’s not to say that all developers are guilty of this, or that there’s any one developer that is always guilty of it. Most developers are smart enough to at least have some form of a demo on the booth floor, allowing players a chance to actually interact with the game itself. But, that said…even demos can be misleading.
Take a look at this demo for Aliens: Colonial Marines. It might not be the most interesting game for someone whose never seen the Aliens movies, but visually the game looks pretty nice and seems to be something that would be action-packed and fun. Now watch the first few minutes of the final release version. Quite a bit different, right?
The issue, it seems, is that developers put more effort into trying to build hype for their games rather than to show what will actually be available. That’s how games look completely awful compared to their demos, how consumers get conflicting messages about new consoles, and how finished products go in a completely different direction from their trailers. It’s inconsistent, it loses trust from the gamers, and it’s just one more problem in a whole host of issues facing the gaming industry today.
Do I necessarily have a way to solve it? No. Other than suggesting that developers always try to offer demos of actual gameplay, rather than “test” gameplay, or developers actually making sure that what they try to showcase at E3 is what they expect the final product to look like, I really can’t do anything to fix the issue. But the issue is still there, and I sure hope something can be done about it.
Jacob Ryckman 