E3 and the death of shock reveals | Opinion
Christopher Dring
Head of Games B2B
Wednesday 8th June 2022
Seven years ago I was sitting at a bloggers table during PlayStation's pre-E3 press conference.
(I wasn't a blogger, but by calling myself one I got a table and good wifi, I'm not sure why).
To jog your memory of this conference, it was the one where Sony re-announced The Last Guardian, the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter was revealed, and Square Enix stunned audiences with a teaser for Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
It was PlayStation at the peak of its popularity. It had staged quite the comeback with PS4 18 months earlier, and this showcase cemented it. The roar that greeted each announcement was deafening. When the Final Fantasy game was revealed, the guy sitting next to me kicked back his chair, fell to his knees and screamed "Oh My God, Oh My God". The church of PlayStation was rocking that day.
On a personal level, I didn't have much connection to any of those announcements, but the excitement was infectious. Share prices rose afterwards and PlayStation was the talk of Los Angeles.
On reflection, however, it was all a bit of fluff. The games existed on paper, but neither Shenmue 3 or the Final Fantasy VII Remake had entered full production. The former hadn't even been funded yet, and the latter was just a trailer put together by the animation team. Both games would take nearly five years before they were released.
Fans went wild for Shenmue and Final Fantasy at E3 2015
Since that day, I've experienced fewer genuine E3 surprises. They've happened, of course, but they're rarer and trickier to keep under wraps. AAA games are taking longer to make and require more people to make them, and keeping them a secret is harder as a result.
And increasingly games companies are announcing their
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