One of the blips on every gamers’ radar is the annual E3 conference. Usually, we get to see upcoming games or we get to hear about projects that are in the pipeline for the future. Occasionally, there’s some hardware reveals too. It’s like Christmas for our industry, except, you know, in June.
The problem – and the problem I have had – historically – with all of these conferences is that there’s a surprising lack of diversity at show. Everyone’s bringing a new iteration of a shooter [and this is a particular problem, in fact. There are so many shooters that it’s difficult to get invested/interested in them] or a new version of a sports game or a slightly updated driving game. To me, this feels pretty bland.
The bright spot – at least for me – is almost always the indie games, because the indie developers are often trying something different. So, I’d like to propose that E3 have an “indie conference” in the style of the Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft conferences.
We Know It Can Be Done
PC is not really a “unified platform” – not in the same way that Xbox One, Playstation 4 and the Wii U are “unified platforms” – as such, there should not have been a way to make a conference for PC, but this was a solvable problem with a sponsor that stepped in [in the form of AMD] who probably under-wrote the whole PC Gaming Show for the sake of advertising. While I wouldn’t want indies to be in that sort of debt to someone like AMD, at least we know that it is possible to host something like this.
We can also see that there are a host of games that would benefit from such a platform: during their conferences, Microsoft and Sony essentially skated right across their indie offerings, barely giving us glimpses at each title.
A dedicated conference would allow those indies to stand up in front of an actual audience and do a little more than just a tech demo.
But How Might It Work?
This, too, is a solvable problem: at this year’s show, Cloud Imperium [the folks behind Star Citizen] were not actually on the show floor, instead, they sent video to the actual PC Gaming Show that they put up on large screens for folks to follow.
In this same way, developers could set up “booths” with their own computers at their own workplaces where they could demonstrate their games through – for example – Twitch streams, Skype calls or various other methods.
The other – quite large problem – is financing. I thought that having AMD as a sponsor was not a bad idea, but I didn’t like the implementation of their sponsorship in that particular program. Instead, I feel that indie incubators should help out in this respect – with – perhaps – slightly longer spots for the actual developers that they are helping along. [this would be a twofold win – it would keep the show on point and it wouldn’t be obtrusive – which was one of the biggest issues I had with the AMD sponsorship of the PC Gaming Show.]
Finally – and as for the line-up, I would hope for a diverse set of developers showing a diverse set of games. As I mentioned in my introductory paragraph, part of the reason I’m a little jaded when it comes to E3 in general is that it seems to be a haven for me-too-ness. There are a lot of people showing off a lot of games, but they all seem to boil down to “here’s a sports game” or “here’s our shooter we just made” or “here’s a new driving game in our present franchise” – and while I applaud that those games exist for people who are into them, I have long since contended that gaming could be about many and varied things.
Games like Tacoma are interesting, to me. Games like Beyond Eyes have a story – and a vision – that very few AAA games can match. I loved the presentation that the developer of Unravel gave – that was more heartfelt than any of the quite scripted jokes that happened at this year’s show.
One other large problem I had with the PC Game Show was that it was too long. Two and a half hours – particularly given how it played out – made it by far the longest conference there was. I didn’t mind the format so much – Day[9] was an excellent host – but there was too much talking and not enough showing.
Instead, what I propose is that each developer gets five or so minutes to show their wares – and I do mean show. None of this “we’ll talk for ten minutes and show a two minute trailer of what we just talked about.”
This particular method – of having a developer come up and show something to the crowd, while talking to a host such as Day[9] should happen for about an hour. At that point, the conference should end for that day. On day two, the same thing should happen again and so on for each day of E3. This way, there’s news every day about indie games – again, making this a bit of a win, since they will be part of the round up that news sites do and keeping the idea of indie visible to the public.
Conclusion
Pixabay