No Hype Here
On the off chance you’re unaware, June is the month where video game fans all over the world come together to embrace long winded reels of trailers once united under the banner of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, aka E3. E3, maligned by pandemic and attendees alike, closed its doors back in 2023 (though the organization behind it has dressed up its corpse in “changing directions” make up), leaving a week-long trailer bonanza shaped hole in the gaming sphere. And so, like a phoenix from the ashes, enter Jeff Knightly to resurrect everyone’s favorite press conference format from the grave of E3 in the form of Summer Game Fest. If there was any doubt remaining, I am not a fan.
I don’t like what Jeff’s done with not-E3, and I don't like what he's done with his annual awards show, The Game Awards, either. But that’s not really what I’m interested in thinking about. There’s ink to be spilled on all the ways the overemphasis on singular announcement trailers and vertical slice demos warp marketing and development work around big splashy one-off events, or how the format’s profit motive (these trailers don’t come cheap) flies in the face of Jeff’s proclaimed desire to elevate the medium. I don’t think I’m the person to write those articles. I don’t have any personal investment in trying to market a game or attract investors, nor do I feel personally slighted when an honoree is ushered off stage mid sentence in order to play the next trailer. I empathize, and it fucks me off, but it’s a fight I support, not the war I’m waging.
Instead, my frustration with this format is one of consumer culture. Trailers are exciting and fun but their hold on the gamer zeitgeist is something that has worn on me over the years, leaving distrust and cynicism. “In Engine.” “Real Time Demo.” “Releasing Next Year.” All little white lies we as the games consuming public have accepted as part and parcel of games marketing. We understand that the legalese is just the modern evolution of the time honored tradition of the bullshot and we read the white text at the bottom of the trailer understanding that its truthfulness is secondary to its potential to generate interactions on twitter. As with Madden screenshots of two decades passed, we are expected to buy in to the advertising theater of target visuals and vertical slices rendered on computers that would bankrupt a small business. We lend our good graces to the games whose devs crunched and marketing budgets ballooned to deliver us a trailer of a game that might exist eventually.
Consumerist Ostriching
As visual fidelity of real time rendering has improved the tactics have changed – HD resolutions aren’t the laughable impossibility they were in the naughts – but the tradition continues. All of these trailers, all of the theatrics of Jeff The Games Guy hosting a glorified advertisement broadcast in the IMAX format his family made its fortunes from, are an excess that contrasts violently with the ongoing depression within the industry itself. Summer Game Fest is an annual ritual in which developers get to show off all their hard work, and gamers get to sit at home posting about how their hard work looks like a bad game from fifteen years ago. A year later, many of those devs having lost their job, gamers get to enjoy the schadenfreude of watching their peers clown on the trailers they thought were less exciting.
I know that there are people who find genuine joy in these events and I am envious of them. Their excitement is palpable and I watch on in envy wishing I could recapture that same joy I felt at twenty, excitedly posting about how incredible the next year of games promised to be. I would be happier if I still felt that. Unfortunately, as I age I’ve struggled to unsee the rites themselves. Where I once saw a fountain of joy and a promise of better futures, I now see a slaughtered goat.
Last year more than a couple thousand games were released on Steam. I could confidently name maybe ten. As my excited friends drummed up bingo cards and meticulously curated their lists of trailer hopefuls, I found myself struggling to think of what I’d be most excited to see. Arkane had a studio shuttered and the other is on a Marvel IP. Obsidian’s work is fantastic but their fantasy offers have been fewer and further between of late. Both studios are owned by Microsoft, a corporation presumably making decisions by lottery – surely no sentient creature would make the decisions they’ve made by deliberate choice. Supergiant just released Hades II and while it’s a good game it also lacks their usual originality. Square Enix is rumored to have cancelled the sequel to Triangle Strategy, my favorite game of theirs since the original Bravely Default, and their upcoming Adventures of Elliot did not inspire confidence with its prologue demo. FromSoft might be cooking something up, though Duskbloods is still in the works. ArenaNet is teasing something, at least.
Games are just taking longer than ever to be developed and yet there are also more games than ever, resulting in a lopsided ratio of high-budget games to total games. We as consumers have been asked to sit through some ungodly number of hours of press conference for decades to see the hot new toys, but even if the trailers ran all week long without break we would be seeing less of the landscape than ever. With such an enormous volume, each game struggles that much more to stand out. Without an enormous marketing budget to buy a prime slot at the show, standing out in a Summer Game Fest is incredibly difficult. Even if you do stand out, success is anything but a guarantee (as Highguard showed so plainly). These shows have become exercises in gorging on a glut of information that no reasonable human can possibly consume. Each show is a shotgun blast, each pellet hoping to find its mark and most failing.
But we’re talking about gamer culture, and the problem lies less in the attempt by developers and marketing teams to find their audience and more in the ways in which the sea of games invites gamers to treat everything that misses its mark as pollution. If you’re coming into Summer Game Fest looking for the new Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer, everything between the start of the show and the moment that trailer airs (if it does at all) is in the way. You might see something you like, but you’ll just as soon forget it if the trailer you’re hoping for doesn’t show – leaving you feeling the show was lacking and disappointing.
The breakneck pacing puts games in direct conversation with each other, often to their own detriment. The indie studio showing an honest trailer of their weird ass action game is going to have a hard time looking good next to the cinematic trailer produced by a team of a hundred developers or the vertical slice of a working title borrowing money from Tencent to attract more veteran talent. The indie action game might be the only game of the three that releases in the next year, and it might be the most fun, but it’s also fighting an uphill battle in an environment that privileges marketing budgets at annual events so heavily. It might find its audience, but it will also elicit a torrent of bored emojis in twitch chat and in reaction threads. This pit fight of trailers consumed in rapid sequence asks its audience to make sport of the exercise and jeer whenever a trailer for something below their imagined standards is on screen. There will always the odd glimpse of positivity but more often there is a chorus of mocking voices, each representing someone hungry for the opportunity to feel smug and superior if some poor fool dares to disagree with their expert opinion.
This is to say, the format may give platform for anyone who can afford it, but in practice it puts smaller, often more experimental titles with smaller marketing budgets, in the unfortunate role of being a spacer between megaton trailers that the audiences show up for. Summer Game Fest offers variety as a means of creating contrast between the mean and the exceptional and insodoing preys on the unfortunate tendency of media consumers to deride anything not their preference as junk. It purports to celebrate a medium and its creatives, but instead offers an arena for an industry's worst consumer tendencies.
Hype Culture
The hype of consumptive culture exists in contrast. Good pressers are described as being without "fluff" or "chaff" and while this can refer to talking heads with a t-shirt and blazer or cinematic trailers lacking gameplay, it also often refers to all the games that don't have the immense marketing budget to produce an extremely high quality gameplay or cinematic trailer. Showcases focusing on smaller games routinely attract smaller audiences and are often derided as distractions away from the main event. Developer interviews, especially those that feature women and people of color, also invite dismissal and eye rolls rationalized by an impatient desire for the "real" show.
I am under no illusions that your average anonymous online games consumer is going to be a zealot for nuance, but I do feel there are systemic means of mitigating the worst tendencies. Hype culture is very much the opposite. Hype culture feeds into fomo, into the impossible demand to play every game with a sufficiently large marketing budget, into the need for games to land perfectly spaced to avoid competition for that month's consumptive energy.
Sometimes hype is organic as in the case of Among Us, which famously exploded after twitch streams put it into the public conscience. Or in the case of games like Outer Wilds or Blue Prince which enjoyed a quiet marketing push but incredibly positive word of mouth and a sense of urgency that you might be spoiled on the intricate secrets if you didn't play. Often, though, hype is neither a deliberate marketing strategy (though marketers are never upset about it!) nor is it a purely organic effort. Rather, hype is the superstructure produced by thousands of articles, memes, videos, and posts about a game.
My issue with hype is two fold: firstly that it encourages consumers to feel obligated to spend their money in order to keep up with peers, and secondly that it often creates a backlash that manifests as, at best, smug derision and at worst, and more often, as harassment.
The first point is simple. Consumerism is not — contrary to the word of its beneficiaries — praxis. It's ugly that virtue as a video game connoisseur is often tied to playing every premium $70 title, owning all the consoles or the best computer hardware, and collecting enormous backlogs of games that you may never play. The number of games in your Steam library says very little about your enjoyment, let alone expertise, in the realm of games and while enthusiasts will often pick up fancy new hardware and accrue large collections they make for bad metrics to assess a poster's commitment to the broad gaming culture.
Hype plays in to this by attaching cultural virtue to certain releases. This isn't necessarily consistent or universal — the demographics who see Slay the Spire II as the frontrunner for game of the year is different from those who are championing 007 First Light — but the pressure to buy in can be strong. "You haven't played Expedition 33!?" or "You gotta hop on Marathon with us!" are ways we express appreciation and enthusiasm for our favorites but they're also ways to demarcate ingroups. It's a natural social pattern but it's also a linking of consumption to value and that weirds me out. It's fine if you're not playing the new big game. Neither have most people.
The more troubling pattern with hype culture is not about how gaming consumers treat each other, but rather how they react when the games they've assigned lofty expectations to disappoint. Gamers have never been a demographic famous for their willingness to forgive and forget, and I'm unsure there's a better case study in their love of retribution than in reactions to hyped games disappointing. Since hype is a consequence of the community discussion around marketing materials rather than an innate property of the marketing itself, often hyped games are hyped not because of what they are but instead what they are imagined to be. When the infinite potential is revealed to be a product under the constraints of our mortal realm (and all the financial, logistical, and personal constraints universal to gamedev), death threats and harassment campaigns are the grim expectation.
Obviously, no one is building their trailers to invite harassment campaigns. Least of all inviting it onto themselves. Rather, the cultural role of these not-E3 pressers as the harbingers of greener grass, with pacing that telegraphs which games ought to be the biggest and best of the next marketing cycle, invites this hype cycle to kick in to overdrive. When the hype crashes and players are brought back to the realm of mere mortals, their worst impulses come out. Whether perpetrated by young people who don't know better or so-called "adults" with head buried firmly in their own asses, the dehumanization and vilification of the people who make games is so common that many simply shrug at its cyclical nature. Part of this is an understanding that if a game occupies the coveted final reveal of a not-E3, it is promising an unmatched experience to viewers.
As absurd as it is, this way of thinking — conceiving of trailers as promissory notes of joy to anyone who overcomes the immense hurdle of $70 — has been a constant undercurrent of games discourse on social media since the days when forums eclipsed microblogs. It's the implication of so many moments of self-aware clarity in the midst of doxxing, death threats, and whatever else. It is very convenient to imagine the corporation rather than the worker and crush them all into a blender independent of other forces. By doing so, one can imagine the trailer as a deception and the target of ire as part of a capitalist demon. Of course, it's not the CEOs who feel the brunt of these campaigns, but if you squint you can just blur the lines enough to justify being an evil shit.
Summer Game Fest, The Game Awards, State of Play, Nintendo Direct, and whatever else are not chiefly responsible for the games industry's maladies. Whether we're talking about the current post-COVID industry depression or the horrible habits of games consumers, not-E3 is low on the totem pole for issues to address. However, increasingly as I grow disillusioned with the format, I see the ways in which this system creates the conditions for the most severe ills to manifest. As I scroll the blog posts and excited reactions of my friends (and surely some derisive whinging as well), I'm not going to stew in rage and disgust at the evil on display. But I will sit with a sense of disquiet, knowing that the corporatized format will bring out some of the most crudely consumerist impulses of fellow hobbyists. There just has to be a better way to do this.