For a very, very long time, the biggest event of the year was E3. Even after other events like Gamescom, TGS and things like Nintendo Directs emerged, E3 was pretty much still THE event of the year. E3 and the weeks leading up to it were absolutely packed with excitement, buzz and optimism as to what sorts of news game makers were going to drop, and it was awesome. Until it wasn’t.

E3’s importance faded over the years thanks to advances in communications technology and competing events, but it was still an exciting time right up until about 2020 and its subsequent death and replacement by Summer Games Fest in 2023. And Summer Games Fest, as it turns out, just ain’t it. We still get lots of announcements and trailers, but absolutely none of that excitement is there anymore. The event just comes and goes, and that’s it.

This year’s Summer Games Fest was especially uneventful, coming and going so quietly that I barely even noticed it, and I’m in the media! It used to be that the weeks leading up to E3 and even the first Summer Games Fest were all kinds of busy.

We’d be prepping thumbnails, making coverage schedules, getting things prepped for announcements we thought were likely to come, claiming stories we wanted to cover should they get announced…it was a whole thing. I’d even take the day off my day job to cover it, that’s how big of a thing it was. No though? We do none of that. It’s just another day.

Going even further back to my high school days in 2006 and 2007 or so, I remember camping out in front of the TV to watch G4’s coverage with discussion panels and interviews, and then spending the next full couple of “week’s discussing everything with my friends. E3 was a magical time of year, and now it feels like that magic is well and truly gone.

The reasons are obvious, of course. Traditional broadcasts aren’t needed to get the news out anymore, nor are brick and mortar destination events. Everything can be done online, and everything is covered and dissected to death by 1,000+ YouTube and Twitch channels.

The speed of news has sped up dramatically too, to the point where news gets old in a matter of hours rather than a couple of days. Such is the thirst for updates these days. Information is and must be constantly blasted out, to the point we’re all practically numb to it.

I don’t think there’s a solution to this or anything. It’s not a problemn per se, but rather a function of the times that I personally don’t like. We’re still getting exciting trailers during Summer Games Fest, but they might as well be the kind of standalone announcements we get througout the rest of the year, you know? There’s none of that extra E3 pizazz.

This is just how it is now, and I participate in it just as much (and just as much to my own detriment) as everyone else. It just really hit me this week just how much it’s changed from even just five years ago, you know?

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How do you feel about Summer Games Fest vs E3? How about how we consume news and such these days? Image from