The lost art of video game announcements – or come back E3, all is forgiven

As the summer showcase season fast approaches why is it that video game publishers seem intent on making unveilings so underwhelming?

The adage that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence explains a worrying amount of human behaviour. When it comes to online fandom it often manifests in the fact that no one is ever happy with what is currently available and is always more interested in what will come out in the future. No matter how many amazing games are released it’s always the unknown that appears more enticing.

This is such a consistent phenomenon that it’s strange that publisher’s attempts to take advantage of it have been so muddled. The old school approach to drumming up in interest in a new game would generally involve a teaser trailer (typically pre-rendered, with no gameplay) and then a gameplay trailer a few months later, followed by hands-on previews with the press. This would typically happen over a period of one to two years and for a long while there seemed little reason to do things any differently.

Occasionally, a particularly high-profile game would decide it was too important to toe the usual line but sometime, before the pandemic, an increasing number of publishers began to believe that drawing out the preview period was putting people off and making them sick of hearing about a game before it came out. There didn’t seem to be any obvious reason why anyone would suddenly start thinking that, en masse, but that’s now the general logic used by most publishers… and it makes everything very boring.

Even assuming the data publishers have been looking at is accurate, they immediately took things to the extreme by announcing new games in the dullest and least exciting way possible, as if they’re advertising a new spreadsheet app and not a potentially mind-blowing piece of new interactive entertainment.

Sony has been at the forefront of this movement, frequently making major announcements via anodyne blog posts, that are written with all the breathless excitement of a tax return. This reached a crescendo of mundanity with the reveal of the release date of Marvel’s Wolverine, via a bland tweet featuring regurgitated artwork and a strange sense of resentment at having to say anything at all.

Others have followed Sony’s lead, such as Microsoft’s attempts to make Forza Horizon 6’s initial gameplay reveal look as dull as possible and then this week’s announcement of two new games from Warhorse Studios – a new Kingdom Come title and a Lord of the Rings game – via a lazy looking tweet that looked like all of five minutes of thought had gone into it.

If any of this was a purposeful attempt to make people less interested in future games, and thereby focus their mind on the present, it would be an interesting bit of reverse psychology but that doesn’t seem to be what’s going on at all. Occam’s razor suggests that publishers are simply looking to save money and betting that that the games will still be just as successful without a complicated and expensive build-up.

Whether that’s true or not it makes the process of following a game’s development less interesting. This is especially true because now that games are generally announced much closer to their release date everything about them inevitably leaks out weeks and months in advance.

This happens with such inevitability that it’s almost impossible to think of any major title, including Nintendo games, that have ’t been leaked before the official reveal. If publishers care about this they don’t show it (actually, that’s a lie, curiously Activision are one of the only to put a stop to it – doing so overnight and thereby proving how easy it would be for everyone else) and it’s easy to imagine they also view this as cost-saving free publicity.

The end result is that the reveal of a new game has gone from one of the most exciting things that can happen in gaming to a mundane box-ticking exercise. The lack of showmanship within the industry at large is palpable and while it doesn’t affect the game itself it’s destroyed the build-up and anticipation, reducing it to an endless parade of poorly explained rumours that may or may not be true.

This whole issue has been fermenting for years now but it may come to a head next month, now that both Microsoft and Sony have announced their dates for the not-E3 showcase season; with Nintendo also rumoured to have a major Direct planned for mid-June.

If only it was E3 – the pre-Covid showcase that the entire industry attended – then you could take that to mean extensive new announcements and a carefully stage-managed event meant to magnify the importance of the reveals even further. But even Summer Game Fest, the closest modern day equivalent, is a shadow of what E3 used to be, with new trailers premiered with such speed and apathy that another half dozen have appeared before you’ve had time to process even one.

Perhaps things will be different this year, since all three publishers have more reason than usual to curry favour with their fans. But more likely the trend of minimum effort announcements will continue and whatever it is that is announced next month will be revealed, in irritatingly small dribs and drabs, over the course of the next week.

That’s not a situation that seems to benefit anyone, but unfortunately lazy indifference has now become the industry standard for revealing new video games.

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