Cinelinx looks to be first off the blocks with their list of winners and losers, but the consensus of opinion seems to be that the only real winner was Keanu Reeves... and even he was only OK, with a stilted, obviously unrehearsed presentation that Reeves basically overcame through sheer charm. The double reveal that a) Reeves had actually done mo-cap and voice work for am NPC in CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077, and b) that he was not only appearing in the game, but at E3 to announce when the game would be coming out, was probably the most scene-stealing moment of Microsoft's conference.
The second most scene-stealing moment of E3 was probably Ikumi Nakamura's instantly meme-worthy appearance as she announced her game, Ghostwire Tokyo, during Bethesda's presser. Nakamura was sincerely enthusiastic, and charmingly goofy, and has become something of an overnight sensation on social media as a result; her game looks pretty decent, too.
We got confirmation that George R. R. Martin really has teamed up with the makers of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice to make a video game; Elden Ring has a terribly generic name, and a meaningless, moody cinematic trailer that hints at an epic scope and dark tone (very much on-brand for both GRRM and From Software), but told us basically nothing about the game itself. Oh, and Forza is getting Lego content added to it, which actually looks surprisingly fun.
And that... was basically it for genuinely memorable E3 moments, this year. Oh, sure, some stuff happened at E3. It's just that most of it wasn't all that memorable or noteworthy.
Por ejemplo, the aforementioned Bethesda presser, at which Ikumi Nakamura stole hears. Todd Howard, Bethesda's CEO, was also at that same presser, and he did all the expected things onstage, like cracking jokes about the disaster that was Fallout 76, and announcing a bunch of additional content for Fallout 76. Yes, Bethesda's biggest news for 2019 was that Fallout 76 would finally be getting some Fallout added to it... seven months after it was released to unsuspecting paying customers.
(Many of the gaming press are reporting this as if Howard and Bethesda totally redeemed themselves at E3 this year, but I'm not buying it. After the shit that Bethesda pulled last year with Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls: Blades, their CEO doesn't score any points with me for pretending to be self-deprecating this one time.)
There were lots of "cinematic" trailers for games, of course, from all the bigs, but even those were weird. None of them showed much by way of characters, or story details, and there was close to zero gameplay on display; Microsoft's new Gear of War 5 trailer, for example, looked like a conceptual short psychological horror film, complete with moody Billie Eilish backing music, but what little gameplay we saw from the same game looked nothing like it. It's as if nobody knew what the message should be, this year, and so they just threw a whole lot of pasta at the wall to see if anything stuck. So far, nothing's stuck.
Microsoft's hardware announcement was equally underwhelming. They failed to provide any details about their upcoming XCloud streaming service, which was a surprise considering that they'd promised details about XCloud in the wake of Google's Stadia announcement. They announced that their new console was in the works, but only talked about it in fairly vague terms, thus passing on the golden opportunity that had been gifted them by Sony's complete absence; it looks like Sony knew what they were doing, when they decided to simply skip this year's show. Hell, Microsoft are still referring to their next-gen console by its Project Scarlett code-name, having apparently not decided yet how they want to brand the thing when it's finally ready.
Moviebob Chipman, a.k.a. The Game Overthinker, had a pretty good take on the whole business.
He was talking about the XBox show, specifically, but his points really do apply to E3 as a whole:
You can't really put this in Microsoft or Team XBox. They're a company looking for an industry center to be the reliable powerhouse consensus choice of, and nobody knows what that is [...] Everything is going to change, but into what? If you were in that situation, you'd also be onstage looking sweaty and panicked going, "What do you want? Whatever you want, we'll do it! Just tell us!"(His take on Keanu Reeves' appearance was also spot on: "It's OK, Keanu, E3 makes everyone look ridiculous.")
So that's E3 in a nutshell: timid, and scatter-shot. Everyone's waiting for something to flip the table and totally change the industry, but nobody knows what the future shape of the industry will be, and everybody's holding onto their cards and chips, waiting for some other sucker to place their bet first... and probably lose.