- Start by announcing a new Halo game.
- Move on to showing actual gameplay footage in the next game you announce, a sequel to the much-loved Ori and the Blind Forest.
- Announce a totally new IP, Sekiro, again with a trailer that includes actual gameplay footage.
- Pause as rarely as possible for speech-making. It is a press conference, after all, and there's corporate messaging to get through, but nobody cares about your corporate bullshit, so don't dwell on it.
- Lather, rinse, and repeat, until you've announced 50 different games.
This is what people watch E3 to see, and wow! did Microsoft ever deliver. The range and sheer variety of games announced was staggering:
- Fallout 76 (no gamplay footage, but damn, did the trailer look sweet)
- The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit (downloadable for free at the end of month!)
- Crackdown 3 (with Terry Crews! Coming...sometime...)
- Metro: Exodus (and damn if Massive Attack's Angel isn't still a great track)
- Kindgom Hearts III
- Forza Horizon 4 (♪ I can see for miles and miles ♫)
- We Happy Few
- The Division 2
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Sessions (whatever the fuck it actually is, although it seems to involve skateboarding)
- Black Desert (looking better than ever)
- Devil May Cry 5
- Cuphead in The Delicious Last Course
- Tunic
- Jump Force
- Dying Light 2
- Battle Toads (yes, really)
- Just Cause 4
- Gears: Pop! (totes adorable)
- Gears 5
And that's not all. Microsoft also announced that they've added several new studios to the Microsoft stable: The Initiative (brand new, and basically a game developer super-group), Undead Labs, Playground Games, Ninja Theory and Compulsion Games should help Microsoft with their lack of 1st-party titles... none of which will be coming to PS4, anymore.
Oh, and interrupting Phil Spencer's closing speech by making it look like the presentation had been hacked, only to cut to our first look at:
21. Cyberpunk 2077?
Genius; pure stagecraft, at its finest. Yes, folks, this is how you bring it, when you're on the biggest stage of the gaming year, with all the world's eyes on you. Hell, I hate hype, and I was excited for some of this shit by the end of Microsoft's show. The only things they were missing? Release dates! Apart for The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, I get the feeling that a most lot of the games announced today won't be out until 2019. Overall, though...
Final Grade: A-.
Microsoft have had a rough couple of years. Their Windows-focused corporate strategy failed; they were not able to leverage a dominant position on desktops into total domination of personal computing on every kind of device, from desktops to laptops to consoles to tablets to phones to refrigerators. The world will not run on Windows 10, and Microsoft are now focusing on AI, cloud computing, and the "intelligent edge," all the local hardware that connects to the cloud.
Which put their XBox division in an awkward spot, because they've clearly lost this console generation while MS wasted time trying to make "fetch" happen. Nintendo Switch is now out-selling the XBox One, and the XBOne hadn't sold that well to start with, so odds are that they'll end this generation in third place, and maybe a distant third. Microsoft needed to make a big splash at E3 this year to have any chance of turning that around, and they knew it. And they acted like they knew it, and consequently they've knocked it out of the park.
Are you taking notes yet, EA? Because this is how it's done.
It may all be for naught, given how far behind they've fallen, but Microsoft's show, today, was a home run. Whoever follows this act, has one damn tough act to follow.