Who won E3 2018?
It has been almost a week that E3 was wrapped up, world’s biggest video game convention. It seems its bit late to write about E3, in fact its too late to say who won it, but I thought its better late than never.
E3 was concluded last Friday (14th of June), after a whole week of full of conferences and awesome surprises (may be not full of surprise, but obviously some surprises). Unlike previous years, this time there were lot of leaks following up to E3. Walmart Canada gets the credit for most, whilst some sources can claim the rest.

I do not want to deep dive into all the conference we had this time, specially me being late to write this article, if you are a video game fan, you should know mostly what happened at E3. Electronic Arts, just like last year, was the first to hold their conference and as most of the time, it was not that exciting. At this point, we are so used to their yearly video game releases (FIFA is something you do not even have to announce anymore at E3 — but that is ok, you have your reasons and we have a good fanbase — fair enough), it is easily predictable what is going to be the next trailer. And we know even if they have good games like Anthem to come out next year, they sure will find a better way to screw things up, nice and slow (prove us wrong, please — we need a good game from BioWare again). But in general, apart from Anthem and my personal favorite Unravel Two, they did not have anything interesting to show us.
Then we had the Microsoft conference. I must say I did not have much faith with them with everything they did over the past couple of years, but they sure did good couple of games, in fact, they surprised us with lot of new game announcements. Even if Phil Spencer started the show with ‘Exclusive Mess’ by confusing us with what the ‘Exclusive’ means (please Microsoft, stop confusing us with lot of Exclusive types — exclusive, console exclusive — I do not even know what these means anymore) and giving us lot of numbers (number of games they were going to show etc.), it was the best conference Xbox had after couple of years. They announced that they have acquired number of new Game studios (five new game studios as I remember — one new studio formed by them and four acquired) and it was the biggest news for most of us. Acquiring Ninja Theory is a huge step, believe me, they are going to come up with great ‘Console Selling’ games for Microsoft. It was in a way a shocking news to some of us, knowing that Ninja Theory was a ‘Sony Friendly’ studio. I think they wanted to Sony to acquire them, but Sony was not interested (bit of drama there). I feel like if Sony did that, they might regret this in near future. Apart from this new studio announcements, Microsoft had some good games like the new Halo game and new Gears game, but the main problem is, we do not know when these games are going to come out. These might be the launch titles for next Microsoft console. Apart from these two games, there were lot of third party game announcements — Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the key third-party announcements — and I think Microsoft’s main focus this time was to tell the games that ‘For the time being, Xbox is the place for playing all third-party games — because we are the world’s most powerful console, but worry not, we are going to get you some good exclusive too — we do not know when — but, soon’. And I think they did a fairly job of delivering this message.
Then came the Bethesda conference, with lot of small announcements, and with two big announcements — Elder Scrolls VI and Starfield. They did announce Fallout 76, which is actually a big announcement, if you are into MMOs. This time their conference was not nearly as good as their 2015 press conference, but still they did an OK job, even if I think they had not done a press conference this year at all. They could have simply added these announcements to Sony or Microsoft press conferences. It was same with SqareEnix as well. They did not have lot of big news to show during their pre-recorded show. They did have Kingdom Hearts 3, but it was everyone’s baby this time, being shown couple of different times, in both Microsoft and Sony conferences. Shadow of the Tomb Raider was also shown, but we all knew what it is by then.
Then came Ubisoft, I have to say, they had good content — The Division 2, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Starlink, Beyond Good and Evil 2, Skull & Bones (Sea of Thieves version of Ubisoft — but seems much better than Sea of Thieves) etc. They started the conference with a ‘not so impressive’ dance just to announce the new Just Dance game and the pace of the presentation was not so interesting — apart from Mr. Miyamoto’s appearance during Starlink announcement.
Sony had a good conference considering the games they showed, but nothing close to their awesome 2016 press conference. Even before the conference, they had announced that there will not be no new first party announcements and they will be focusing on Spider Man, Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding and Last of Us Part 2. That is exactly what they did, and they showed lot of gameplay from these two games. They started with Last of Us Part 2, which was in my opinion the best gameplay footage of this year’s E3. For Sony also, the problem was the pacing of their conference. They had multiple locations for their conference, they had to transfer people from one place to another, it was a mess. I honestly do not know why they did this, considering the awesome gameplay footages they had to show. If it was not for this bad pacing, I would easily have said Sony won E3 2018. But they screwed up the pacing of the presentation, big time.
One interesting thing I realized during Sony’s conference was that this console generation is coming to an end. It was clear that Sony wanted to show only four of their major first party titles and they did not even want to talk about anything else. It seems apart from these four games, we will not see any big first party title to Playstation 4. All their first party studios must be busy with ‘launch titles’ for Playstation 5.
Finally, we had Nintendo E3 press conference. It was — as most of the time — a pre-recorded Nintendo Direct type of show and they allocated most of their time to show new Super Smash Brothers game. Apart from that, they announced Fortnite and new Pokémon game (Let’s go Pikachu and Let’s go Eevee). It was kind of heart breaking for lot of Nintendo fans to not to hear anything about Metroid, but in my opinion, the show was good.
So, who won E3? In my opinion, it really is a close call between Microsoft and Sony. Both Microsoft and Sony apparently had different objectives this time, Microsoft being wanted to show the gamers ‘we have not given up — Xbox is still the best place to play third party titles’, while Sony being open to the gamers about their last couple of ‘console selling’ exclusives (probably the last major first party titles) and may be trying to conclude this generation by the end of 2019. Sony have anyway won this console generation by now with a huge leap and they might be focusing on next generation. On the other hand, Microsoft have anyway lost this generation with sales numbers (as far as we know) and they have stopped trying to win this generation but trying to dominate next generation by getting ready with all First Party Game Studios they just acquired. Competition is getting into a heated state — both in this generation right now and apparently in the beginning of next generation — so we, as gamers, are going to get the advantage.