Four big discovery takeaways from 'not-E3'

gamedeveloper.com:

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Salutations, my comrades in video game discovery. We’re back in our little newsletter-building content management system (shout-out, CMS nerds!) and ready to spray some text-based commentary at you. We very much appreciate you reading, btw.

The subject of today’s lead story? We just flew in from watching all those ‘world premieres’, and boy, our arms are tired.* (*Editor’s note: we actually just stayed in our house - that joke 100% doesn’t work.) But what things should we learn from the last few days’ dizzying array of game showcases? We’ve got some ideas.

If we were to describe the amount of content hurled towards our eyeballs in recent days, we would say - ‘a lot’. And here’s our attempt to distil all of that down into trends:

If you look at the E3Recap 2022 website - the only place I know which tries to link to trailers individually - you can see 568 game trailers listed across all ‘not-E3’ showcases. So if you felt like you were drowning in new content, that’s why!

What if you want to work out what happened & don’t have all day? I found IGN’s 7-minute trailer-only edits of big events - which they did for the big Xbox/Bethesda show & for the Summer Game Fest kickoff - to be handy.

And there’s a lot of useful articles putting all game trailer for a show in one place - for example RPS on Day Of The Devs’ line-up, or Polygon on some of the Wholesome Games showcase notables. Nonetheless, I’m a high-information intake individual, and I found the sheer amount of info a bit incomprehensible. Don’t fret if you do too.

If you