There was no E3 – but Microsoft won it anyway | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

There is at least one long-standing E3 tradition that has now outlived E3 itself: the picking of winners and losers from the event.

This is a distributed, largely subjective process of judgment and evaluation which has on some occasions been quite spurious and misguided, but at other times has genuinely set the tone for the competitive landscape of the year to come. Whatever failings ultimately sank E3 – and there were many, many failings – the show's position on the calendar was no accident. It remains perfectly balanced right at the point when companies have locked down their holiday release schedules and are ready to start looking forward to the following year's tentpole titles; with or without a trade show to anchor it, the start of June is always going to be a milestone games companies are focused on.

Consequently, it's always going to be an opportunity to take the pulse and temperature of the industry's market leaders – if not to declare outright winners and losers, then at least to get a sense of where we're going in the next 12 to 18 months.

All of this musing is not really required this year, I suppose, because this is one of those rare years in which there's an obvious winner: Microsoft.

Microsoft 'won' whatever this echoed remnant of E3 is, and it wasn't even close. You can measure that by just about any metric you fancy, if you want to get all quantitative about it; the games Microsoft announced and showed off garnered the most attention and acclaim no matter what yardstick you choose to use. Perhaps for the first time since the Xbox 360 generation, Microsoft is walking away from (the ghost of) E3 with a forward software pipeline that's very clearly head and shoulders ahead of its rivals' offerings thus far – an incredibly important shot in the arm not only for public perception of Xbox (which has been having a tough time in the past year) but also, no doubt, for confidence within the company itself.

The caveat – and it's a big one – is that one other thing