The all-digital reveal season is winning me over

If you'd told me 15 years ago that I'd no longer have to trek halfway across the world to LA to see the biggest games of the festive season and beyond, I'd have bitten your hand off. Yet as I work through endless showcases and reveals from the comfort of my sofa — in glorious Ultra HD, surrounded by more speakers than any one person needs — I'm not sure I can cope with much more. And we've still got Summer Game Fest and the Xbox Games Showcase to go.

‍

Back to Insights

‍

This isn't about falling out of love with gaming, far from it. But other than Wolverine gameplay and the exciting look at Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, a lot of the other trailers and announcements have somehow blurred together in my brain. Perhaps there's a touch of the Xbox Game Pass effect in this ultimate democratisation of game reveals: when there are biscuits in the tin, you always want a chocolate bar, except there are no chocolate bars.

Take a more positive view of announce season, though, and it's wonderful to have both fans and the games media focused on game reveals all week. You can dip in and out, you don't have to queue for hours, and you won't pick up bites from unidentified bed bugs in some god-forsaken hotel.

In 2026, perhaps the challenge is now about getting people’s attention, not just views.

‍

See also: Case Studies

I can still vividly recall the iconic GTA IV reveal from 2007: the train, the city, the sunshine and the Philip Glass soundtrack, and I haven't seen it in at least 15 years. Ask me anything about the Stuntman Hollywood trailer from Sony's State of Play I watched yesterday, though, and I'd struggle to get beyond cameos of KITT from Knight Rider and the DeLorean from Back to the Future.

I'm not an old man pining for days gone by. Far from it. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, revealed at a particularly stacked Xbox Showcase two years ago, went on to become the most talked-about game of the year, thanks to a strikingly surreal world that had people talking long before anyone got to play it.

‍

Back to Homepage

‍

I know enough about the economics of game development to understand that dropping a game the moment you reveal it effectively wipes out any pre-launch promotion, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The Finals didn't make anybody's game-of-the-year list for 2023, yet there was something brilliant about being able to download the shooter while watching the rest of The Game Awards. It surged to around 250,000 concurrent players at its Steam peak and briefly outpaced that year's Call of Duty, capitalising on the buzz and turning trailer views into actual players, with none of the seven-year wait endured by anyone whose interest was piqued by the 2017 Skull and Bones reveal, only for the game to finally land in 2024.

‍

When it comes to neo-announce season replacing E3, I'm still not sure which is the parking lot and which is paradise, and so the humming continues. My optimism is clearly returning, though, because I'm still holding out for a double-bluff Project Helix reveal at the Xbox event. Don't Stop Believin'!