Summer Game Fest Replacing E3 Is Great For Industry Diversity

thegamer.com:

We all exist in our own little bubbles. Often, these bubbles are harmless. They give us a place to go to talk about the benefits of the double pivot and the trequartista, or to debate theories about Jar Jar Binks being the most powerful Jedi in Star Wars. Sometimes they also lead you to storm the US Capitol with gallows demanding politicians be killed. Other times they're a terrible Judd Apatow movie. Bubbles are a mixed bag, really. I work in a bubble of gaming journalists, and that's why it has taken me so long to figure out how I feel about Summer Game Fest replacing E3.

For the record, it is not the official replacement, but with E3's power waning and with the pandemic forcing it into successive cancellations - likely for good - Geoff Keighley's all singing, all dancing, all pretending nothing is rotten in the state of Amazon Blizzard Summer Game Fest has stepped up to the plate. To hear gaming journalists tell it, this is a bad thing, or at the very least a sad state of affairs, but I think we should all of us - players and journalists - be looking at this as the future of gaming.

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E3 was prohibitively expensive to attend. You needed to travel to LA (or live there, which is extremely expensive), stay several nights in a hotel Downtown (extremely expensive), find time to work on the floor while juggling appointments, interviews, and showcases (many of which could be delayed through no fault of your own), eat several meals out (extremely expensive), and then travel home (you guessed it). Many journalists would have these costs partially or totally covered by the site they work/freelance for, but many many many more were either not established enough or were