The idea of regularly-updated console hardware seems dead in the water | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

Rob Fahey

Contributing Editor

Friday 10th June 2022

Not-E3 Week is in full swing once more. This week of events organised by publishers and platform holders is so similar in terms of reach and effectiveness to an actual E3 week that the ESA's insistence that its flagship event will return any year now is starting to sound more and more like a Monty Python sketch; this trade show isn't dead, it's just sleeping.

E3's actual show floor had been increasingly hollowed out for many years by the shift in focus to publisher and platform-holder events held in the days before the show; its absence in the past few years has barely caused a tremor in the functioning of the industry's calendar and news cycles. So it is that we can look to Not-E3 Week and, despite the lack of an actual show, draw conclusions and comparisons with previous years relatively confidently, albeit tempered by the knowledge that some announcements will be deliberately held back from this week in order to ensure their thunder remains un-stolen.

I'm not sure how ready the industry or its consumers ever were for annually iterated console hardware, but the idea is clearly on the back-burner for the time being

There are several conclusions you might draw from this week's Not-E3, but one observation you might have found yourself making in passing is, "Huh, no hardware." Not even a sniff of hardware, in fact; the closest any company got to talking about a significant hardware release so far was Sony revealing some of the games line-up for PSVR2, but the headset itself or any details about its launch were a no-show. Updated consoles, though? Any sign of an improvement on the Switch, or a mid-cycle refresh for the PS5 or Xbox Series systems? Absolutely nothing. (Granted,