Retailers

So who is E3 for? The retailers. Most of whom don't need it either. What began as a venue for publishers to show their wares to buyers has ballooned into something too big and loud to be useful to anyone.

Here’s a buyer for [name of retailer deleted] coming in late to a demo. The developers offer to restart the demo from the beginning, but he shakes his head and tells them, ‘naw, it’s okay, go on’. He then proceeds to ignore the game as his eyes play over the PR woman’s chest and it’s painfully obvious to everyone involved that he doesn’t know the first thing about this game or the one that preceded it and he’s going to order it or not based solely on the what he reads on the product sheet this winter. And suddenly I feel a little dirty for being involved in the whole thing and I’d rather just go home and play Rise of Nations, which is what it really all comes down to: a game ends up on my hard drive, on your hard drive, and we’re sitting in front of it, losing time and the space around us, sinking into whatever’s happening behind our monitors where none of the rest of it matters.

This is where gaming journalism, if there is any such thing, belongs. Not at E3, which is yet another example of the industry maturing into big business with retailers puling the strings, just like they did with small boxes, ESRB ratings, short shelf lives, and the supremacy of end cap displays. It’s all an example of the stuff that comes between you and the people who make the games for you. It is a celebration of and for middlemen, and if it were up to me, it would be a thing of the past.

And by the way, can we also cancel that whole holiday season thing, too?