Game Reveals kind of suck now .. (and they kind of always have)

2026-06-08 00:31 UTC

Every year I try to get my self excited about watching the gaming summer shows , what use to be E3. This year honestly I just couldn’t. I tried watching a few minutes of both the Sony and Summer Games fest and felt bored. I’m sure a lot of these games these they show will be great. But the way the present most of them honestly doesn’t engage me in the slightest. Sometimes you get a cinematic trailer that shows no gameplay sometimes (mostimes) you get just gameplay with no context. I feel like the presentation format doesn’t work for games not anymore anyway. I feel like just setting up a YouTube channel or a playlist with game logos , descriptions and back stories with a small trailer would work so much better. Unlike E3 this SGF is a Geoff cash grab where most larger companies seldom take part. Outside of new hardware I don’t see the need for this no context trailer barrage. Maybe I’m just out of touch maybe I’m just insane. Thoughts ? Edit :: people seem to be getting stuck on the title (which I’ve updated). I’m not saying all game reveals are bad. There have been some genuine gems. In some cases those gems were not the actual game. But it got the job done. This is my commentary on how I see the modern gaming marketing landscape.

Replies (8)

@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 2026-06-08 03:38

I just can’t stand marketers, and that’s all these shows are now. I hate the artificial dialogue in the trailers, the fake views of the games, everything is “curated”, and it feels so fake. Then also what’s the point of getting hyped because a heavy double digit percentage will be minimum delayed, or even full-out cancelled (because hype is a metric now). I wait for game dev streams, at least sometimes you’ll get a real dev who isn’t “PR trained” talking about their game, and then you can get a realistic idea of how complete it actually is. Satisfactory did it best in my opinion. True early access, they had minimum monthly videos showing the progress, they had a regular EA release cadence every 6 months, they actually engaged on Discord/Reddit/etc (You could literally @ them on the platforms and they’d respond, not just “join our discord” with a bunch of unanswered question with no actual company presence). Then when 1.0 actually released it was (I believe) CoffeeStains biggest and most anticipated release. It felt real, authentic, actual people making a game. Not a marketing team shilling.

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@exu@feditown.com 2026-06-08 04:35

The Devolver “E3” presentation was always great. I think they stopped making them though.

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@Summzashi@lemmy.world 2026-06-08 05:04

I really miss the E3 days but it’s not hard to see why we’ve arrived here. Also back in the day many if not most presentations were garbage. Half the fun was making fun of them with friends. For us it’s still an excuse to get everyone together and sometimes it even feels like the old days. Sometimes.

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@psx_crab@lemmy.zip 2026-06-08 05:30

You and me same, but i think for me i’m just jaded by the abundance amount of game and dev that i can’t really keep up who is what anymore. Nothing is fresh if you ate too much of it over the year, and once your mind tell you “ehh, why bother” you will move on from these hype train. I used to sit through all these livestreamed event but nowadays i just scroll through them and watch what piqued my interest, or play the demo on steam.

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@REDACTED@infosec.pub 2026-06-08 05:35

30 Seconds of ambient sounds while some guy speaks the most generic words 5 seconds of some random gameplay footage that’s not telling me much The crowd goes wild(?)

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@OriginEnergySux@lemmy.world 2026-06-08 00:47

My pet hate was always trailers not showing gameplay

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@thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 2026-06-08 06:37

I recently showed a 60-something year old relative the two GTA6 trailers, while explaining my looking forward to trailer 3 and the game’s launch. They remembered me playing Vice City back in the early 00s, so we watched its first two trailers also and let me tell you - for all of modern gaming’s faults - marketing has gotten a lot better in the intervening years.

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@sophie_talks@lemmy.world 2026-06-09 07:13

I think part of the issue is that there are simply so many games competing for attention now. Even good trailers can blend together after a while. What usually gets me interested isn’t the trailer itself…it’s when I can quickly understand the game’s core idea and what makes it different from everything else being shown.

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