The E3 Portal Abomination
This year, the ESA officially announced it would be taking its trade show to the digital realm while the world recovers from the pandemic we’ve just come out of. The digital realm, however, is the most uninspired and bleak portal you’ve ever come across.
What the ESA promised was an online portal where both press and fans would be able to interact with the various developers and publisher who had officially partnered with E3 2021 to check out game previews, interviews and talk to them about upcoming games and their various details.
The reality was a portal that had empty calendars for publishers, a business card system that was pointless, an equally pointless messaging system that didn’t seem to actually send messages to publishers, and a gamification system to top it all off.
In other words, it was a complete mess. There wasn’t really any point in it at all, with each of the digital showcases providing more details about the games than were provided at each of the digital ‘booths.’
It’s clear that the vision for the E3 2021 portal was far grander than how the finished product came to be. Unfortunately, though, this end product does nothing to instill any confidence that E3 really needs to exist in a digital capacity, at least.
Here’s hoping we can return to normality next year.
