i think i might hate games showcases.

i don't think this is a hot take.

i hated e3 basically from moment one. there was only one year i really liked the main stage e3 stuff and it was 2015 - i remember a lot of stuff from the back of 2015 clearly. there was unravel, a sweet little adventure game that people still to this day call "the most sincere thing at e3", not that there's new competitors. i remember the return of the nintendo world championships. i was a huge game grumps fan at the time, and hey, arin was competing. it included splatoon, it included mario maker, two of the better nintendo things during what historians will remember as "the great and terrible reign of the wii u, a console which should have never seen the light of day". and not long after that, undertale came by, and the world changed around it. you could define cultural epochs around the world pre- and post-undertale.

and then in 2017, you got what i'm calling the harbinger of the end. in 2017, devolver digital did an e3 presentation. i have complex feelings about devolver digital that amount to "the idea of the indie publisher exists to dilute the transparency of labor, we should all be manually burning CDs with our games and leaving them in local libraries and the record shops that are a little too chill to survive" that is also layered with "oh my god they are obnoxious". there's a lot of big feelings there that might be better suited for another blog post.

in this sense, i think the arrival of devolver digital on the scene could be marked as akin to when you start appending post- to a genre. post-rock. post-grunge. post-canon. post-e3. the scene has happened, it is no longer speaking the vernacular of the moment, its time as the most cutting edge thing has passed, and we need to move on to the next shape.

so atop that obvious structural failure, e3 didn't really survive covid. kind of anticlimactic, really, but what other way could it have gone? e3 was a huge money sink and if being bad was enough to kill a project, there would be no video games at all. so as e3 was on its death bed, people realized the benefits of doing their own thing greatly outweighed the failure. the game awards balkanized similarly, and we're now in what will be remembered as "the warring states period" that results in a lot of just… total dogshit fiefdoms. a lot of people are staking their claims on being an iconic showcase.

in one case i was actually kind of delightfully surprised, in that the second wind showcase was way better than i ever expected something revolving around yahtzee's persona to ever be. a lot of "queer showcases" still routinely fail to include trans women at all, on that "afab-only marketing" grind. so a decent few games being made by trans women in the second wind showcase was like. hey, that's nice. better than i expected the dude who is still playing the character he invented in 2008 to be doing. conversely, on the other end of the dogshit, some youtuber themed around luigi held a games showcase themed around glizzies this year. truly, the bar cannot get much lower. like. what on earth.

a major problem with these showcases is that they're kind of insular. take indie quest 2026. it's a showcase just for indie jrpgs. it opens with a big crossover game between a bunch of other games. it had the energy of like… in the moment i compared it to how my brother my brother and me used to do ads for other podcasts. and you really got the impression that the podcast they were advertising was hosted by some really good friends who love to joke with each other, but you are not in that in-group and thus would kind of just be parasocial if you were to approach.

that kind of goes against what the appeal of a showcase is, right? at least to an outsider, anyway. it's a lot of things you don't really know about. you learn about new things. and if you're going to indie quest 2026, the showcase revolving around indie jrpgs, you probably either don't know much about the scene in general, and the presentation becomes overwhelming because not only are these individual projects their own things, but they cross over and spin off and remake and reinvent and hang out. it's a whole living scene, and you're not in it.

or you know everything about the scene. and you are there showing up for friends. to compare, i'm thinking about the energy around sahcon's showcases (rest in peace, sahcon.) the sahcon showcase was an event within homestuck fandom to showcase fan works. it really comes together to present homestuck fandom as a bunch of really talented people coming together to make art they're proud of. it's like a talent show, and all of your friends are participating. you show up not just for your own work, but all of your friends, too.

but the showcase as marketing arm starts to tip its hand here: if you're applying to every showcase that will take you, where are your friends? if you're applying to every showcase, and you get in every showcase, you're spending that "see something you might not know about" coin, and you're getting repeat views. you're probably not making a new trailer. and you risk oversaturating yourself.

and here's when it started to all stick out. here's what the point is: it's all gambling, right?

obviously, everything is gambling! we live in wonderful times. you don't need to be an arms manufacturer to be a war profiteer anymore. and games showcases are skinner boxes. of course, i have a really permissive definition of a skinner box here - anything that relies on the output of utter dogshit to keep you rolling on a table. every time you watch a trailer for some shit you don't care about with the hopes that the next one will be one you give a shit about, you are getting pavlov's dog-ed.

i don't know. maybe that's just me looking for grounds to be a hater. but i don't like it. and of course, there's always the fear of missing out. every game dev ever is in full panic mode. the industry is crumbling around us, the money economy is in shambles and the attention economy isn't holding up any better.

but i don't think devs need these showcases. if anything, i think that naming these showcases for the skinner boxes they are can help break that fomo, that "i need to be doing the most" feeling.

your game deserves better than to be the trash pull on an over-full loot table.

all that said, i do have a pretty good time watching games showcases, but that's mostly because i am doing so with friends. it's not the worst thing in the world to crack a drink and hang out with friends and watch some dogshit trailers for bad games.

here's some games i'm looking forward to that i have seen in showcases:

servant of the lake, a rusty lake game. i knew about this one in advance because i have been playing through these games with a friend recently. it's been a few years since the last one but i enjoy the moody, cerebral puzzle nonsense.
bulbo's belief system, another puzzle game. kind of like baba is you but you can forget rules. the art is really appealing, the core mechanic seems fun and silly. i'm into it.
funeral for the sun, a detective game. looks like it's good tonally and could be really great.