The PC Gaming Show Needs To Change

Terrible, grossly mismanaged, an ineffective attempt to garner viewership and attention by imitating the fickle and bland nature of late-night shows, and whatever obscenely long word best describes ads for credit cards designed for “gamers.” I’m sorry Richard Whiteley, the best I’m coming up with is only four letters, six at a push. There is a lot to say about the PC Gaming Showcase on any given year, 2016 was a Bottom reference, 2018 is the year of the Maneater joke, 2019 was grandad and alright, there was no year called 2020, and 2021 made me want to Yodel like Goofy down a cliff.

When I packed in any attempt to watch this year’s abomination, it was the point I began to make jokes I am definitely not allowed to repeat. I can say it was around the I am Future and the Great Houses of Caldaria trailers. I’ll let you guess what I said. The truth of the matter is, my complaints aren’t about the games, though a 6-minute “interview” about Arma 4 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, followed by another ad for “gamer” credit cards, can climb in a bin. I have an issue with the format and how self-assured they are that this is totally working.

I’ll put my hand up and say it now, PC gaming is the grandad of platforms, and everyone loves grandad. These showcases are an echo of that, with trailers that have about as much energy as I do after climbing out of a chair, and interviews with even less energy. This is something that may actually work in a shrunken format done over several days or even weeks, somewhat like the late-night show that is still being attempted despite dying on its hole the first time out. It is the format that is the problem, and while there have been several variations on it, it has never fully worked as it should.

I said something last year about the expectations of viewers when it came to the 2K keynote about diversity. People want to see games and lots of them at E3. What I keep saying about this in private messages is (of course) very straightforward (and vulgar) but the gist is that everyone just wants a quick-fire burst of games. My preferred pace of these shows involves 90-120-second trailers back-to-back. However, I’m willing to give something bigger more time to explain its mechanics. The perfect trailer for triple-A games would be Just Cause 3‘s E3 trailer, as it showed the mechanics, did so quickly, and doesn’t have any chaff on it.

In a direct comparison, the PC Gaming Showcase consistently misses that mark and instead focuses on interviews that have been pre-interviewed to the teeth. It also focuses on very few trailers that plainly excite. It is a show that is about as inspired as a politician in the wake of a national tragedy as they are paid-off under the table. Single trailers on their own are fine, a few of them in a collective for this show are fine too. However, it is that connective tissue of presenters with trite scripts, predatory ads, and unnecessary interviews that’s the problem. This year had a script that is plainly unfunny, a lead presenter that could talk about his favorite color, beige, and did I mention the predatory ads?

Luckily, it lacked the tech-talk this year, either that or I’ve consumed enough methylated spirits to induce amnesia. Yet everything else did remain, which makes me think someone is taking deals from under the table. This is a showcase run by a gaming magazine/website, so why are we getting the interviews here? If I’m excited about a game, I’ll go find the social media accounts. I’ll find the proper interviews, and I’ll find the details on my own. This format of the show simply doesn’t work for a modern audience that grew up with Twitter or other platforms.

In the early 2000s when all you had was PC Gamer, Edge, early Eurogamer, the several Nintendo magazines, the mostly pen-flicking magazines that had to write about the Dreamcast releases for 128-pages every month, and so on, this may have been more useful. One consolidated area to get all your E3 news for your platform with developer interviews, gameplay, and ads for tech that spell out the alphabet with their names would be nice. Of course, that never came about because internet streaming of the time is much like a specific Mercedes F1 car, downright dreadful. If you go back several years and look into those shows, it was a conference room with a small TV and 40 journalists/industry professionals doodling.

Over the last several years, E3 or any cobbled-together online variant has focused on the presentation to concisely and directly show the games and information you want. The PC Gaming Show is not that. I don’t think anyone (aside from the exceptionally boring) would describe a majority of the PC Gaming showcases as concise or any other synonym to that effect. That’s the trouble here, despite years of possible refinement into a showcase that cut away a majority of the excess to the show, it has regressed into something far from what a good portion of people wants to see.

This year saw the trailers for Demonschool, a pixelated Persona-like with Italian horror elements. The trailer for Agent 64: Spies Never Die had the foyer scene from The Matrix: Reloaded, and I’m here for its, “no one else is making a decent looking classic Bond game” attitude. Fans of Klei’s games will have Rotwood to look forward to, a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler. One of my favorite games shown was the latest title from Tom Francis (of Gunpoint and Heat Signature fame) called Tactical Breach Wizards. Need I say more? Nivalis is a cyberpunk life-sim game where you manage a small café. Then finally of my highlights was Laysara: Summit Kingdom, a city-builder on the side and top of a mountain.

My point here is that in 123 words, something you can read in less than a minute, I covered six fantastic games in the time that the PC Gaming Showcase would only introduce another space horror game. Either the showcases need to stop and something else take its place, or the PC Gaming Show needs to change. It ranged from ads for credit cards, graphics cards you still can’t afford and interviews with no energy to prolonged trailers that lost a beating pulse, as was the case with the adaptation to Stanislaw Lem’s The Invincible. Someone needs to figure out a solution and do so quickly because it is no longer funny to look at it.