Sony’s Shawn Layden says E3 has lost its impact

Sony announced a while ago that it would not take part in E3 2019, but had not revealed the real reason for its absence, while Nintendo and Microsoft went the opposite way and confirmed their presence at the event. In an interview with CNET, Shawn Layden, who heads PlayStation’s internal studios, said that E3 has lost its impact and that the event needs to quickly find a new way to become relevant. Here are Layden’s words in full:

“We now have an event in February called Destination PlayStation, where we bring together all the retailers and third-party partners to hear the news of the year. We are discussing purchasing in February. Nowadays, June is simply too late to discuss Christmas with retailers.

“With our decision to make fewer games – bigger games – over longer periods of time, we reached a point where June 2019 was not the moment for us to have something new to say. We felt that if we ring the bell and people show up in force, they will have an expectation, ‘oh, they’re going to tell us something’.”

“Are we making progress in conversations about how to turn E3 into something more relevant? Can E3 turn into a video game festival for fans, where we don’t go there to drop the new bomb? Can’t it simply be a celebration of games and have presentations where game creators get closer to the fans?””

What do you think about this? Has E3 really lost its relevance with the spread of the internet, or is it now showing its shine, since we can follow announcements and events in real time?

Source: Eurogamer