Game Makers Are About to Promise the World at E3 Again — Here Are the Changes and Games Worth Watching

E3 is open to the public for the first time, and it now has panel discussions where well-known figures argue about where the industry is headed. The show is starting to look like a fan convention.

This is the week every gamer has been waiting for. All eyes are on E3, the Olympics of electronic entertainment.

Every year in early June, when the big publishers bombard the crowd at the Los Angeles Convention Center with trailers, playable demos and fresh announcements, you can feel the players' excitement even through a computer screen. Over the next few days E3 sets social feeds alight, and marketing of every kind pushes countless viewers into preordering. Months, sometimes a year later, when the finished game finally arrives, they may regret the impulse — but everyone is already waiting for the next carnival. This is a show that magnifies everything wonderful about video games, and that makes it easy to get hooked.

This year's E3 differs from past years in two big ways: it is open to the public for the first time, and it has added a series of panel discussions called the Coliseum. In other words, it now leans toward ordinary players rather than industry insiders.

None of this came out of nowhere. Go back to the beginning and you find that E3's growth curve has tracked the growth of the games market exactly. The video game market exploded in the 1990s, and global revenue had passed US$8 billion by 1995.

But the industry still had no trade show of its own and drew little attention from the wider world. Most publishers could only attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where they were treated as oddities. In 1994 the IDSA (Interactive Digital Software Association, the predecessor of today's Entertainment Software Association, ESA) was founded to pull the interactive entertainment industry together and fix that. After talks with the Consumer Electronics Association, which ran CES, broke down, the IDSA staged its own trade show, E3, in 1995 — a platform connecting game companies, retailers and the press.

A show open only to insiders said something plainly: retailers, not individual players, were what exhibitors cared about most back then. Retailers decided how many units shipped, so before publishers could please players, they had to please sellers. Retailers were the bridge between game companies and the public.

That did not last. Like every other content business, gaming is moving from physical to digital, from offline to online. Faster connections, bigger console storage, convenient digital storefronts and online membership discounts have led more and more players to download games and skip physical retailers altogether.

Publishers are glad to see it. Selling online cuts out layers of middlemen, pushing the profit margin on a digital copy to 80%, against roughly 60% for a disc. EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft, Square Enix — nearly every game company's annual report has at some point carried the line "fast-growing digital sales, now the bulk of revenue, offset the decline in physical disc sales."

Life keeps getting harder for physical game sellers. Mass-market chains like Best Buy and retailers closer to core players like GameStop have both watched disc sales weaken; GameStop has suffered the worst of it and started closing stores.

For publishers, the rise of digital content and the decline of physical retail mean a game's fate is no longer in retailers' hands — it has been handed back to players themselves. Exhibiting at E3 is not as necessary as it was. Set against paying steep venue and equipment rental fees to put on a show crowded with competitors, there are now plenty of ways to reach the public that work just as well. Social networks, gaming podcasts on YouTube and Twitch streams all let publishers talk to players directly. The most fashionable move among publishers lately is probably what Destiny 2 and Call of Duty: WWII did: stream the trailer and gameplay reveal across the whole internet and let the game ride straight into "what's trending now."

Since last year, several companies including EA and Activision have given up their E3 exhibit slots. To get closer to consumers they dropped the press-conference format and set up their own events instead — friendlier, more interactive, with more for players to do.

Even though some publishers now treat it as optional, E3 is still the most closely watched feast of the year. But to keep its old influence and hold on to the publishers it has left, it has to change. Watching the consumer-facing PAX festivals come from behind and take some of the shine off traditional trade shows — Germany's Gamescom, the Tokyo Game Show and the rest — E3 has recognized the need too. It is time to become friendlier to ordinary fans and to keep the heat up with a broader audience.

People have been calling for E3 to open to the public for years, but it was not until 2016 that the ESA tried E3 Live, a free public event held outside the main hall in Los Angeles. This year is the first time E3 has opened to players completely: 15,000 tickets at US$250 apiece sold out fast (attending the business dinner costs more still), which says something about how much enthusiasm is left.

As E3 turns into "the players' E3," another change follows close behind. This year's new addition, E3 Coliseum, will add some depth to a show that has always been a string of press conferences.

The Coliseum comes out of a collaboration between the ESA and Geoff Keighley, producer of The Game Awards (TGA). It is a series of panels with publishers including Activision, Bethesda, Gearbox, Microsoft, Sony, Square Enix, Warner Bros. and Ubisoft, who will tell the public how their games — released and unreleased — were made, and talk about where the industry is going. Special guests from film and media will appear to discuss crossover subjects. "A lot of game teams have made appearing at the Coliseum a top priority — for almost every major game at E3, we have some kind of presentation planned," Keighley said.

E3 is working hard to care more about the consumer's experience. The Coliseum gives players a chance to stand close to the people who make games and hear the story behind them, and gives them something to look forward to beyond squeezing into press conferences and queueing to play demos. It is meant to make the people who paid $250 feel the money was well spent.

So this year's E3 will feel more like San Diego Comic-Con, a place fans travel to in person. With 15,000 extra ordinary players, a packed venue and one panel after another, the show will probably generate heat beyond the game announcements themselves and set off more conversations worth having. Whether this attempt at reinvention works matters enormously to E3. Keighley himself is confident: "I think this is absolutely the direction E3 should go."

What does a convention-style E3 actually look like, and will the people who go feel it was worth the ticket — better than staying home and watching the stream? We will know soon enough.

This year's E3 runs from June 11 to 15. Below are the companies holding press conferences during the show and the products of theirs you might care about, listed in chronological order, with times converted to Beijing time.

EA

Sunday, June 11, 3:00 a.m.

This is the second year running that EA is not exhibiting at E3, though it is still riding the show's heat. Its venue sits far from downtown Los Angeles, at the Palladium theater in Hollywood. EA is not a company that likes "surprises"; what it likes is "big and steady," and it is good at using its slot to show off the details of games it has already confirmed.

Star Wars Battlefront II and Need for Speed Payback, two AAA titles, will certainly turn up in the presentation. The first will make up for the disappointment its predecessor handed players and give the game a real story, and may even show more tied to Star Wars: Episode VIII. The second takes over the slot the Battlefield series used to hold — for a franchise more than 20 years old, that is not a tall order. In sports, EA's specialty, the annual editions NFL 18 and FIFA 18 remain dependable.

In earlier coverage we mentioned that EA's BioWare studio, the maker of Mass Effect: Andromeda, has begun work on a new IP. Its release has been pushed past April 2018, reportedly because the team is "putting work into the game's online mode." That suggests the new IP will follow the industry's turn toward games as long-term services, ending up something like The Division or Destiny. The release date is still far off, but EA may let a little slip.

Microsoft

Monday, June 12, 5:00 a.m.

Project Scorpio will be the center of the press conference. In this generation's console fight, the Xbox One has fallen clearly behind the PS4: figures Sony released this week show PS4 sales in North America are already double the Xbox's. On exclusives the PS4 also has the edge, thanks to well-reviewed games like Uncharted. Scorpio could change a lot of that.

Sold on "4K ultra-high resolution," it is more than 4.5 times as powerful as the Xbox One/S, more than 3.3 times the PS4 and about 1.4 times the PS4 Pro. The machine is strong in every respect and will also run Xbox One games, giving them higher resolution and smoother frame rates through online patches. In short, it wants you to play high-definition games without a stutter.

More details will come out at the press conference, the price among them. If it costs more than the US$399 PS4 Pro, players may hesitate. Microsoft will have to convince them it is really worth that much.

Selling a console is ultimately about selling games. Crackdown 3 and the multiplayer pirate game Sea of Thieves are confirmed for the Scorpio segment. Middle-earth: Shadow of War and the next Tomb Raider will most likely appear as well.

One more thing is settled: there will be no Xbox VR product this year. Microsoft's Alex Kipman says the company is focused on the "mixed reality" project for Windows 10 PCs, not the Xbox. Microsoft believes "console VR should be wireless." So it is unlikely to enter console VR any time soon.

Bethesda

Monday, June 12, noon

Bethesda rarely disappoints at E3. Last year we got the first trailer for Prey; before that, in 2015, Dishonored 2 and Fallout 4 sent players into a frenzy.

This year Bethesda's new IP may be the rumored Starfield, said to be an open-world science fiction game whose story connects to one of the studio's existing worlds. In film the idea of a shared "universe" has been worn out, but transplanted into games it is still an interesting notion. Everything about this mysterious title is guesswork, and it may well skip this year's E3 to avoid tiring players out with a long marketing run.

Beyond that, a VR version of Fallout and a Switch version of The Elder Scrolls are worth watching. There may be a few surprises too — Bethesda is good at those.

Ubisoft

Tuesday, June 13, 4:00 a.m.

Ubisoft, the trailer factory, will bring more of its beautiful, film-like trailers. Whether you believe what they promise is for each player to decide. But you will probably find yourself unable to stop hitting preorder because of them.

Among the familiar titles, Assassin's Creed Origins will be all over E3 coverage; a CG trailer is a certainty, gameplay footage less so. Far Cry 5, announced a few weeks ago, moves the fighting onto American soil while keeping the series' realism and political subtext, and is worth waiting for. There is also a rumor that Ubisoft's Rabbids will "cross over" with Nintendo's Super Mario in a multiplayer game called Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle; watch how it performs on the Switch.

Also expected: South Park, The Crew 2 and Just Dance 2018.

Will Ubisoft show a new IP? On this year's earnings call the company said that concentrating on online services for its older games has eased the pressure to develop new IP. A new one could still show up as a surprise.

Worth noting: besides Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, Ubisoft will show another sequel. CFO Alain Martinez hinted that "it's a multiplayer game with strong online missions." That type is no surprise: every "online" feature serves one purpose, which is to keep you spending.

Sony

Tuesday, June 13, 9:00 a.m.

Ever since the PS4 launched, Sony has used exclusives year after year to make players sigh over how a game is meant to be played. This year Microsoft moved first: Scorpio is powerful and runs both new and old games, which robs the word "remaster" of its purpose. Sony has no new console to answer with. Its one advantage may be price — a cut to the PS4 Pro could take some of the appeal out of the pricier Scorpio.

There is more bad news. Hideo Kojima's much-anticipated horror game Death Stranding is confirmed to be absent from E3. On the 8th he tweeted: "Sorry to the fans, but Death Stranding won't be at E3, because we're all buried in development." Kojima himself will still attend E3 Coliseum, sharing a panel with Jordan Vogt-Roberts, director of Kong: Skull Island, who is working on the Metal Gear Solid film.

Shenmue III will be missing too. The game made a dazzling debut at E3 2015 and crowdfunded more than US$6.3 million, then went quiet for a long time; its release has slipped to the second half of 2018, and it will skip the show again this year.

There are still new games worth waiting for, two of them brief appearances from 2016: the post-apocalyptic survival sandbox Days Gone and God of War. And The Last of Us Part II, which needs no explanation.

Sony's press conferences are always full of surprises that get the blood going. This year's may be led by Spider-Man, and could include the long-awaited Bloodborne 2 plus a batch of interesting indie games (No Man's Sky, the game everyone argued about, took its first step at E3). To keep pace with Microsoft this year, Sony can only keep leaning on exclusives and unexpected announcements. Will it announce its next console? That would probably bring the roof down.

Nintendo

Wednesday, June 14, midnight

Nintendo's hour-long presentation has always worked differently from other companies' press conferences. This year the focus is plainly the Switch, whose sales have been remarkable. Confirmed Switch games include Super Mario Odyssey, the first sandbox-style Mario; Splatoon 2, which Nintendo will surely not waste this last chance to push; Arms, due soon, which early press reviews on Metacritic scored a high 78; Mario + Rabbids, made with Ubisoft; and Fire Emblem and Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

Cover image from: The Last of Us Part II