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On the off chance you're unaware, June is the month where video game fans all
over the world come together to embrace long winded reels of trailers once
united under the banner of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, aka E3. E3,
maligned by pandemic and attendees alike, closed its doors back in 2023
(though the organization behind it has dressed up its corpse in "changing
directions"] make up), leaving a week-long trailer bonanza shaped hole in the
gaming sphere. And so, like a phoenix from the ashes, enter Jeff Knightly to
resurrect everyone's favorite press conference format from the grave of E3 in
the form of Summer Game Fest. If there was any doubt remaining, I am not a
fan.
I don't like what Jeff's done with not-E3, and I don't like what he's done
with his annual awards show, The Game Awards, either. But that's not _really_
what I'm interested in thinking about. There's ink to be spilled on all the
ways the overemphasis on singular announcement trailers and vertical slice
demos warp marketing and development work around big splashy one-off events,
or how the format's profit motive (<a href="https://kotaku.com/summer-game-
fest-sgf-prices-traile</description>
pierre44
1781164996
Strong piece, though I'd push back slightly on one thing: I don't think the format is the root cause so much as a convenient amplifier. The consumer tendencies you're describing the entitlement, the harassment, the hype cycle those exist in film fandom, in sports, in music. The not-E3 presser makes it louder and more concentrated, sure, but I'm skeptical that a better format produces meaningfully better behavior from the same audience. That said, the point about smaller games being used as spacer material between megaton reveals is one I hadn't quite articulated to myself before reading this. That's a real structural problem. An indie with an honest trailer getting buried not because the audience dislikes it but because it exists in the wrong slot that's a format failure, not just a culture failure.
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PaulG
1781164697
The part about hype being what a game is imagined to be rather than what it is hit harder than I expected. I've been burned by that exact thing — convinced myself a game was going to be one thing based on a 90-second trailer, spent months in that headspace, and then felt genuinely betrayed when it turned out to just be a normal video game. That's not the developer's fault. That's me mistaking marketing theater for a contract.
What gets me is how normalized that feeling of betrayal has become. People talk about being "lied to" by a trailer like it's a factual description of events. Nobody lied to you. You extrapolated wildly from carefully edited footage and then held a real human being responsible for the gap between your imagination and their product.
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