Reaction: Gamescom Has Proved Not Everything Needs A Digital Showcase

It has to be absolutely ****ing exhausting trying to keep gamers happy. It's no wonder Nintendo stopped doing regular Directs and MS dropped Inside Xbox.

Agreed, this year's Gamescom seemed so pointless. There weren't enough announcements to warrant two full showcases. Most of the stuff announced could've just been conveyed through blog posts, especially the stuff shown in Microsoft's showcase. Even if they set up expectations by telling us beforehand what to expect, you're still having a 90 minutes showcase at Gamescom, which will make people think that it's an important thing to watch. But it really wasn't and all that did was hurt Microsoft. Sometimes it's better to not show anything at all than show up and disappoint most people.

I read a couple of comments that said that Microsoft is doing great with Game Pass and first-party titles but they absolutely suck at presentations. I agree with this sentiment, the indie showcases haven't been good in the slightest and Gamescom further solidified this reasoning. At this rate, Microsoft should just take notes from Sony. If you have something significant to show us, then by all means. If not, then keep it simple with blog posts or trailers on YouTube.

E3 wasn't bad, but I didn't watch this one.

I think one digital presentation a year is more than enough. Nintendo can do their thing, Sony can do their thing, and Xbox can either start their own thing, or do one big E3 event for anything appearing on an xbox platform.

I'd also say to drop the vague trailers and tease trailers and stick purely with gameplay and release date announcements. Do that once, mid year, to lay out what's coming. Show off exactly what it is you are buying and when you can buy it. Job done. To me, that's the stuff that's exciting.

I feel that these events would be a lot better received if they were tighter with the time frame. If Gamescom was all crammed into a 20minute presentation it would have actually been really good in my view. It's the drawn out approach to a lot of these digital events I find to be the problem.

@XxEvilAshxX Definitely agree with you there. No enthusiast/hobby group I'm a part of is as consistently unhappy as gamers, its weird.

To the topic at hand, I thought overall it was good, much MUCH better than the debacle that was E3 this year. Though while I understand the organizers want to have as many games as possible, these things are way too long and really should be short, to the point with little talking in between. Not every single thing needs a 1-2+ minute intro, let the games speak for themselves

Hopefully people will just remember the great E3 Xbox presser and erase this out of their memory. Microsoft has had a killer year, with GOTY contenders as exclusives and GamePass blowing away the competition. (And I say this also owning a PS5). The holiday season is Xbox’s for the taking, especially if Infinite turns out well.

@John117 I think you're confusing the two indie showcases from this year. The first one was four hours long and nobody liked it from what I've seen due to how long it went on. The second one was better since it was only two hours, but there was still way too much talking. Naturally, Microsoft's E3 conference was great!

It just feels like the Gamescom showcase was mostly filler. If they had included Halo Infinite, more gameplay of The Gunk, shown off Scorn and so on, then it would've been a much better show overall. But they didn't and hopefully they can improve upon this in the future.

I think digital delivery is still the way forward, I found E3 worse as you had a lot of small digital events around it trying that weren’t officially part of E3 to compete(ign and gamrsradar both had one and there were others). MS did temper expectations and this time of year should be to hype Q4 releases. Make it an hour and then advertise a Go Forza as following on. Halo should have been in the Xbox show too, also needed more focus on the Gunk and Scorn if they are coming this year. Flight Sim was probably the highlight, Age of Empires should have been a highlight but the content was a misfire.

I liked it. I think showcases are important for any industry. It's about showing face. I loved hearing from the developers in Microsoft's presentation. These people really seem to care about their product and that's uplifting for a person that's been in an industry for over a decade and losing my passion for it.

I think Xbox and Playstation in 2021 was very much like Nintendo in 2020. Not enough content that's actually coming out in the near future for a showcase to work well. Sony decided to focus on 1 game at a time and be silent for everything else which was the Nintendo 2020 approach, meanwhile Microsoft had a bunch of mediocre to bad showcases.

That's so tiresome. This never ending thought that every single event has to bring all AAA games in the world. I found amazing that in a event with more than 40 Games people still can't find anything they can enjoy to play, and go out talking how bad the event was. I'm sorry, but if in 2 days of event with more than 40 games being showed and you couldn't find anything to your like the problem isn't the event.

There is also people that complain about interviews on those events, even with the organizers stating this will happen before the event date. Microsoft said 'keep expectations low' and there were people expecting big announcements on Xbox showcase. It's complicated to satisfy a group of people that simply don't read events descriptions and then complain about said events.

If you don't like interviews, just watch the compact video that releases just after those events to be aware of everything presented.

The most unsatisfied community in the world is gaming community, the complaint has no end.

MS’s and Nintendo’s E3s were perfect absolutely done right. MSs extended showcase and Nintendo’s treehouse work to.

However, the more I see of Keighley the more I think he’s part of the issue. He keeps trying to make every event this big thing, like why did we have Gamescon awards? totally unnecessary.

Xbox nailed it at E3 in both original and extended showcase. Gamescom showcase was basically doing the extended thing all over again but there were problems
1) there was nothing to extend and expand on (unlike E3 where they worked further on what they had)

2) the E3 extended had a great host with Parris but adding Kate Yaeger trying to add that typical hyper-cool hyper-energetic vibe in a show where you spend 5 minutes talking about Trebuchets or whatever. Really Xbox? (P.S: Nothing against the person just saying what didn't work).

3) Saving the Halo announcement for Gamescom was also a bad idea. Specially when they still couldn't show a proper campaign trailer anyway. So the game just looked lame in there.

@mousieone Problem is that there is only so many big announcements in any given year in the industry. Specially now that every game is a decade-long thing. E3 worked well back in 360 era because there were a ton of games. You had 4 halo games on 360. Keighley is just doing what he can to boost his own name and career and we can't blame him for trying. But in the current gaming landscape if companies manage to make one good presentation per year that's already more than expected.