Hype machine breakdown: EA flops at E3

E3 is the single biggest event on the video games industry calendar. This is video gaming's Super Bowl. This is the one time of the year when everybody who gives a shit about video games is paying attention, willingly suspending their disbelief, literally begging to be hyped. If you've got a public relations A game, this is the time to bring it.

EA... did not bring it.

• Yes, Sea of Solitude looks pretty cool, although it would have been better to be shown the game, rather than have an indie studio head with no PR-fu just stand there talking about it. 
• Long-time fans of Command and Conquer were not hyped to see the storied franchise turned into a mediocre mobile game. 
• Presentations for the oligatory FIFA and Madden offerings ran way too long, and showed nothing that fans of those games haven't seen before.
• Speaking of obligatory, the latest Battlefield game will have a Battle Royale mode. Because of course it will. Because EA's execs have no imagination whatsoever. Never mind that BFV's devs were saying just a month ago that their game wasn't going to add a BR mode just to add it, but whatevs.
• People who were hoping for more information about the upcoming Anthem were disappointed. It still looks like Destiny, though.

Worst of all, though, at least to me, was EA's ongoing failure with the Star Wars franchise.

EA has had the exclusive license to produce Star Wars branded games for five years now. In that time, they've shat out two mediocre instalments of Star Wars: Battlefront. The first was largely empty and widely regarded as having been essentially unfinished at launch; the second entered beta with a gambling-based loot crate progression system that provoked such a backlash that multiple jurisdictions in Europe are talking about prosecuting any other publisher who dares to go there.

EA did have a story-focused single-player Star Wars game in the works, but they cancelled that so hard that the studio that was making it is gone now. reportedly, this is because they couldn't figure out a way to put loot boxes in the fucking thing.

(Anthem, BTW, will not have loot boxes. EA, who just months ago were telling shareholders that they were all in on loot boxes, now can't talk enough about how their games won't have loot boxes. EA actually apologized on-stage at E3 for the loot box fiasco. Such is the legacy of Star Wars: Battlefront II.)

Andrea Rene's face in this still kinda says it all.

And so here we are, five years into EA's stewardship of Stars Wars gamedom, and what do EA have in the production pipeline? Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order. Which is still so early in its development cycle that they can't even show us a logo for the fucking thing, and the announcement of which was so slapdash and last-minute that it was literally just Andrea Rene, interviewing the head of the studio that was making the thing, in the fucking audience because EA hadn't planned well ahead enough to bring him up on stage.

Seriously, having exclusive rights to make Star Wars video games is like having a license to print money. How are they fucking it up this badly? And how much longer can they keep fucking it up before Disney/Lucasfilm revoke the license?

(Andrea Rene, BTW, still looks fabulous, and did her level, professional best to make EA's turd sandwich of a presser watchable. She failed, but that's not her fault. Nobody could have saved this mess.)

And that was it. With the entire day to themselves (EA's was the only presser scheduled for Saturday), with the eyes of the entire gaming world on them and only them, as the opening act of the single biggest event on the gaming calendar, EA talked interminably about their games, but showed almost nothing, revealed nothing new of note, and continued to do nothing with possibly the second most valuable license in the entertainment industry next to Marvel's. It was like a masterclass on how not to do a press conference.

Grade: F.

I know others are giving them a D, but that seems overly generous. This is the Super Bowl of the video games year. You have to bring stuff to show people, and you have to do a better job of presenting it than this. EA have a long streak of terrible E3 pressers, and this year's did not break that streak. Seriously, did anyone at EA plan anything in advance, or did they throw it all together at the last minute? Other companies will have spent months planning their E3 strategy; EA's effort feels like they threw it together in a week. I expect at least the appearance of a better PR effort from a company with EA's PR budget.