Before to start, the following paragraphs are just a bit of reasoning behind my scores for all the E3 conferences that I've watched, so just feel free to ignore them if you're not interested. If you still want to know the scores, they are in the table at the end of this post, but one thing you should know before getting there is that, just like I do with movies, I've tried to rate these showcases according to what they are: I'm just not going to rate some indie conference in the same standards than a conference of a big publisher, just as I wouldn't rate an action movie in the same way than a romantic or an independent one. Also, I'm actually used to rate movies and I normally use a scale of 0,5 (0,5 - 1 - 1,5 - 2, etc.), because I think that using a scale of 1 is not enough to capture all the nuances, yet using less than that comes with the underlying risk of becoming somewhat arbitrary. In this case, however, since I'm not so used to rate E3 conferences and I think a scale of 1 is just enough for this purpose, that's what I'll be using. So no 7,5's or 6,5's or whatever. This is not too important, I guess, but I thought it was worth mentioning it.
First of all, I want to say that this E3 wasn't as bad (to me) as everyone is claiming, since almost all the showcases had more than one game that I found interesting and that I would like to play in the future.
That said, the worst for me was Bandai Namco, because they only showed one game and they didn't offer anything new about it, apart from a few details in the interview. It would've being nice if they would've actually shown some new gameplay or mode or something, like Warner Bros. Games did with Back 4 Blood. Capcom suffers from the exact same problem: there were no games that can be actually called new in their showcase. I know they already claimed before the event that this was going to be the case, but that doesn't make it better. As for Square Enix, they just dedicated too much time to just one game. If they would've done that after the conference or in a different stream outside the E3, their showcase would've been much better paced; also shorter, but a conference doesn't need to be long in order to be good.
And now, the positives, in which I include, yes, Ubisoft: their conference is a 6 to me and if either Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope or Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora would've been ready for a release in 2021, that 6 would be a 7. Upload VR, for its part, didn't have any games as big as those two (obviously), but it had a few interesting ones that could've made that conference even better, if not for the lack of variety: around half (or maybe more) of the games shown there were shooters. Now, I know that VR is still an emerging technology and some genres are a better fit for it than others, but I would've liked to see a more varied line-up, honestly. Another joining the club of 6 is PC Gaming. This showcase actually did a good job in terms of games shown, but it was also exceeeeeeessively long. One hour is the longest that I'd consider nice for a conference of this kind... and with that length you're still playing with fire if you don't do it right. With such a long conference as PC Gaming did, they were indeed able to show a lot of games, but at the expense of making them look less relevant, which is not good. Also, I didn't like their attempt to make their conference funny, but I don't mind it much, because at least those gags helped keeping the conference at a good pace.
Another conference that also had some gags - but this time (way) better than the ones in PC Gaming - was Revolver Digital: it wasn't the greatest in terms of games shown, but it still had several that looked appealing and it was quite entertaining to watch. A showcase that made it better that Revolver Digital when it comes to games shown was the Indie Showcase, but the pace was just not good: they just put there a lot of games together, with only a brief pause in the middle, which was essentially an advertisement. I still liked it, but I think it had the potential to be a bit better. Which was the case with Yooreka Studio: they didn't show as many games as the Indie Showcase, but all of them felt important on their own and a few were appeling to me. And more or less at the same level we have Intellivision, which introduced their brand new console, Amico, with a nice variety of games and a bunch of cool features. The presentation itself was not the best, however, and the console should be cheaper, in my opinion.
And finally, the top three: Freedom Games, Nintendo and Microsoft + Bethesda. About Freedom Games, I'll only say that it was some sort of a beefed up Yooreka Studio: a better made showcase with a nice variety of games, which all felt important and looked even better than the ones shown in Yooreka. Overall, a quite enjoyable little show. As for Nintendo, well, they had a few unexpected games accompanied by other long expected ones and, besides that, some more, most of them scheduled for 2021. So in general, it was a solid conference and if the release date for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Untitled would've been 2021, or if another heavy hitter would've had a 2021 release date, I'd give it a 9. Same with Microsoft: lots of appealing games and surprises, and lots of them exclusive, but lots of them also for 2022; if one of those games, let's say Starfield, was ready for a release in 2021, I'd give it a 9 too.
As for who "won" the E3, I'd choose Freedom Games just to give some love to which is (in my book) the best of the smaller showcases, but since that one is not in the poll, that leaves me only with Nintendo and Microsoft. Between those two, since Nintendo already has a large fanbase on this site and Microsoft (in spite of the lots of defensive love that it gets from its fans) is always getting huge amounts of excessive, undeserved and sometimes almost irrational hate, I'm going to choose Microsoft. I know, I know, this an entirely political decision what I'm making here, but that's what you get for not making Freedom Games available in the poll. =P
As a side note, I would've liked to watch something from Sony, even if it was technically not part of the E3. It's actually nice to have conferences of each one of the big three just one or two days apart from each other, so watching the E3 without Sony is like riding a tricycle with just two wheels (yes, I know that's called a bicycle, but you know what I mean).
And here are the scores:
| Microsoft + Bethesda | 8 |
| Nintendo | 8 |
| Freedom Games | 8 |
| Yooreka Studio | 7 |
| Intellivision | 7 |
| Revolver Digital | 7 |
| Indie Showcase | 6 |
| PC Gaming | 6 |
| Upload VR | 6 |
| Ubisoft | 6 |
| Square Enix | 5 |
| Warner Bros. Games | 4 |
| Capcom | 4 |
| Bandai Namco | 2 |
I'm mostly a lurker now.
