"Typically, companies overpromise on software and hardware, showing pre-rendered videos and screenshots that don't represent final releases. Nokia somehow managed to do the opposite; they failed to showcase what the N-Gage was actually capable of at one of the most important gaming events of the time. No-one was excited to hype up a game experience like this."
Sometimes, the first impression was so bad the game or console is doomed no matter how well-received it turns out to be. Regardless of the product, first impressions count. And when the first impressions of a product give consumers at large no confidence that it will be worth their money, that's going to affect consumer perceptions of a product even if there's time for a course correction.
Do not add any examples to this page without discussion over whether the presentation you want to add actually qualifies first. There is a big difference between a botched presentation that is a technical trainwreck and/or kills all hype for a game/system and a presentation that was simply boring, lacked any heavy hitting announcements, or received Hype Backlash afterward because it lacked an announcement the Vocal Minority heavily expected.
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1995-2010
- Nowadays, it's common for gaming presentations to include at least one game that is released during the presentation itself, but Sega's surprise launch of the Sega Saturn during E3 1995 proved to be a bit too ahead of its time, resulting in one of the most infamous misfires in gaming history. The console was intended to launch in September of that year, but Sega suddenly decided to move the release date ahead by 4 months and launch it during the presentation instead. Intended as a chance to gain a head start, it instead backfired spectacularly and served a major role in the downfall of Sega as a console developer, for the following reasons:
- Most retailers, including Walmart, were caught off guard, and were pissed that Sega had circumvented them for their rivals. This gave them little incentive to sell the Saturn, and they teamed up with their rivals instead.
- As a consequence of their lack of planning, only six games were available at launch, and the intended console seller Virtua Fighter ended up being a buggy mess as a result of the early launch. Furthermore, not only were retailers out of the know about the surprise launch until it happened, so were the third-party developers. Since none of said developers were even remotely ready to put out their games yet, the console effectively began with a four month drought of releases, souring trust both in developers and in consumers right out the gate.
- Its $400 pricetag, combined with the above problems, ensured that there was little interest among consumers in picking one up. Add in Sony upstaging Sega
with a lower $300 for their hyped PlayStation, and the fate of the Saturn was all but sealed. All Steve Race did was walk up to the podium, say "299", and walk away. The audience responded with rapturous applause. - The aftermath: The failure of the Saturn thanks to Sega's abysmal marketing decisions eliminated the last chance they had had to save themselves after the failure of the Sega CD and Sega 32X. Sega was eventually forced to release a successor, the Sega Dreamcast, in 1998 (Japan) and 1999 (overseas), just four years after the Saturn's release in the respective regions. On its own, the Saturn failure may have been survivable in the long term, but the nature of its failure, combined with the numerous other mistakes Sega made before and after (including, most infamously, transpacific Executive Meddling from Japan in response to an IPO from the originally planned chip supplier for the Dreamcast that led to not just an acrimonious lawsuit but also Electronic Arts cutting ties with Sega), ensured that despite the Dreamcast's strong launch it was likely doomed from the beginning. To be successful, it required ludicrous sales that the wait-and-see approach gamers took made impossible to achieve, and all it took to kill any hope of its success was the announcement of the PlayStation 2, ultimately leading to Sega withdrawing from the console market. The Dreamcast's lifespan was so short that it was discontinued before two of its would-be competitors (the Xbox and the GameCube) hit the stores—in fact, Sonic Adventure 2, a first-party title, was ported to the latter after less than a year, even being a launch title in PAL regions. This video sums up the entire fiasco quite nicely.
- The Nokia E3 2003 Presentation where they unveiled their handheld gaming device, the Nokia N-Gage. While a smaller affair than Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony's conferences, the press felt welcomed by Nokia's floor display. Then the presentation started, which was less than impressive. Four hip hop breakdancers went up on stage to bust some moves and play on their own N-Gages to showcase the multiplayer and mobile functionality, which came off as dated. After that, the presenters showed up to talk about the N-Gage while showing gameplay footage. However, not only was the lineup not wowing the press since it was mostly ports of older gamesnote , the ultimate killer was the frame rate being shown, which was reflected on the demo N-Gages as well. The 3D games were running with a lower FPS than the final product, giving off the impression that the N-Gage was far less powerful than it was. To top things off, the price was announced by a model taking her shirt off to reveal "$299" drawn on her abdomen - which was three times the price of the N-Gage’s primary competition, the Game Boy Advance. Like Sony's E3 over the PS3 in 2006, the crowd gawked at the price and what potential momentum Nokia could've drawn for their handheld was effectively killed. You can read more about the E3 coverage from Eurogamer here and Rerez talks about the presentation on their video over the N-Gage here.
- The Sony E3 2006 Presentation, despite having some highlights such as the Metal Gear Solid 4 and Uncharted trailers, was considered a total practical joke of a press conference by most everyone. Mainly intended to drum up hype for their then-upcoming PlayStation 3, it instead left people unenthused about it. This presentation helped ensure that the PS3 stayed in dead last among their competition in the 7th console generation for a long time, despite dominating the industry for the past two generations and their solid recovery efforts that barely put its sales ahead of the Xbox 360 years later. Josh Scorcher declared it as Sony's second-biggest failure, putting it behind only their notorious penchant for arrogance and previously cited Sony's early mishandling of the PS3 in general, implicitly including this presentation, as the only reason the Red Ring of Deathnote wasn't a Franchise Killer for the Xbox brand. Or watch the presentation in its entirety here. Among the lowlights were:
- The presentation of Ridge Racer (or "Riiiiiidge Racer") to advertise their PlayStation Network Service offering PlayStation games on the PSP. That the audience was completely silent during this part shows just how little anybody cared.
- The Genji: Days of the Blade presentation, where Sony was boasting that it was based off of real Japanese historical events, only to instantly disprove this by showing a Boss Battle with the Trope Namer for Giant Enemy Crab. While certainly a So Bad, It's Good moment that instantly went Memetic, it wasn't persuasive to most people that the launch library of the PlayStation 3 was worth their time.
- Then there's the Sixaxis demonstration, where they show off its capabilities and brag about how innovative it is, trying to convince people it was more than a last-second effort to upstage the Wii's more impressive motion controls. Nobody was fooled, and it didn't help that it came at the expense of Rumble, which had otherwise been an industry standard since the Nintendo 64 (scuttlebug was the Sixaxis only happened because of legal issues Sony had with the Rumble feature of prior controllers at the time).
- The final nail in the coffin came with the announcement of the PlayStation 3's "599 US Dollars" launch price. With this being the most expensive launch price of a console in almost a decade, few would end up rushing to pick one up, and Sony's arrogant statements making clear how justified they thought the pricetag was did no favors. Not even being a comparatively cheap Blu-ray player at the time was enough to convince people, and what certainly didn't help was the 2008 Great Recession that was just around the corner, which stunted the adoption of HD home media as many people during that era could not afford HDTVs which were required to truly take advantage of Blu-Ray's improved picture quality. It also allowed Nintendo to effortlessly upstage Sony with the Wii's $250 launch price, and for Microsoft to regain their footing after the RROD debacle. The disastrous launch of the PlayStation 3 that was in no small part a result of the conference left Sony with little choice but to drop its price, several times, in order to get people to start buying the system.
- Around the time E3 was getting mainstream publicity equal to major tech conferences, Disney chose to try and host a presentation at the conference. Disney's E3 2007 presentation was only an hour long, had very little revealed besides licensed games, the presenters were all exceptionally wooden (including "volunteers" who were obviously paid actors) and it concluded on one of the most cringeworthy events in the history of the conference: a full team of cheerleaders came in and begun a fully choreographed music number in the style of High School Musical, an event which left what little remaining audience there was in a state of, to quote a journalist who attended, "incredulity, despair, and extreme embarrassment." Needless to say, Disney didn't hold a show the following year.
- The Nintendo E3 2008 Presentation is considered an all-time low for a variety of reasons. Arlo recounts the entire sorry presentation here, you can watch it yourself here, or, if you want real-time reactions, you can read Nintendo Life's live text commentary from the time, which borders on Apocalyptic Log. In short:
- The entire show consisted of a long series of segments that were largely dedicated to market research and unfunny jokes that would be more at home at an office meeting than at a big show dedicated to fun and games.
- The scant few actual game reveals were mostly third-party titles and/or lacking information, most infamously the Shawn White's Snowboarding segment. The reveal of the Guest Star drew a bit of applause and cheering, but once that faded viewers were left with the sight of a grown man badly playing a video game in front of a quiet audience while emitting forced laughs, which is exactly as cringe-inducing as it sounds.
- The few first party announcements were either real bare-bones (new Mario and Zelda games, with no information other than that they're in development) or for more casual games: Animal Crossing: City Folk, Wii Sports Resort, and Wii Music (see below). Animal Crossing alone wasn't enough to save the show, and Wii Sports Resort had the misfortune of being attached to the reveal of the Wii MotionPlus, which was another flop, as Reggie was clearly expecting applause, only to get nothing.
- Finally, the most infamous part of the presentation: the Wii Music reveal, which Nintendo was banking on as the big "hype generator" of the presentation, a mark they missed by a wide margin. Even worse were the gameplay demonstrations, featuring drums being banged randomly with no sense of rhythm and a very bad performance of the Super Mario Bros. theme.
- While the aftermath wasn't immediate, it's likely their setback from 2008 (alongside technical difficulties from 2010 and widely criticized 2012 presentation) ultimately led to Nintendo stopping the previously traditional E3 showcase live in front of crowds to their newer, E3 Nintendo Direct tradition that started in 2013note and for the most part, they continue under positive reception to this day.
- The Microsoft E3 2010 Presentations (yes, plural) may well have been the nadir of E3 2010, even keeping in mind Nintendo's catastrophically botched presentation of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. This was the year where Microsoft launched the Kinect, and they made a huge effort promoting it. Neither of their events did much good for publicity of the peripheral, but for more specific details:
- The exclusive Sunday Kinect presentation. They were clearly trying to put on a show for those invited, even paying for Cirque du Soleil. Among those who attended, however, it became infamous for having everybody wear white ponchos and be uncomfortably crammed together with everybody else in the venue, a bunch of bizarre performances, and very few details about the Kinect itself with only some brief game footage (details were saved for the main E3 presentation). Most of the game journalists who attended and reported on it were not impressed.
- Even more infamous was the main E3 presentation. While they briefly gave airtime to titles most fans were interested in, such as Halo: Reach, they devoted the vast majority of time to the Kinect, showing off the upcoming games in more detail, almost all of which were blatant rip-offs of games already available on the Wii. They also showed off many features with unconvincing actors, a Justin Bieber song when his hatedom was still going strong, and how you could use it to control watching movies, a passive activity that gels poorly with a peripheral requiring you to stand up to function properly. It's telling that the main highlight was the unveiling of a new Xbox 360 model and giving a bunch out for free, seemingly as an apology for the conference. An image with a visibly unimpressed audience that included Shigeru Miyamoto is considered emblematic of Microsoft's E3 that year. These conferences irreparably tainted the Kinect brand, making it dreaded anytime Microsoft talked about it in future conferences and forcing Microsoft to drop support for all versions of it by the end of 2017.
- While not as bad as the Microsoft presentation in terms of PR, Konami E3 2010 is infamous for being perhaps the most uncomfortable presentation in the history of the event. While the games showcased were fine (including Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Silent Hill: Downpour, and two Castlevania games), the issue came in that virtually none of the people involved had much in the way of stage experience, and the Japanese devs had no translators and thus spoke in very stilted and accented English. This combined with a large number of poorly-done skits (including one infamous part involving a trio of luchadors, done to promote the company's licensed wrestling game based on the Mexican AAA lucha-libre promotion) turned the presentation into the world's most awkward variety show as the presenters went through each poorly-handled reveal and discussion after the next, leaving the entire audience uncomfortable in the process. To this day, it's shorthand for how a presentation can go terribly wrong from a design standpoint.
2013-2021
- The Ouya presentation at SXSW 2013 killed a lot of the initial hype generated the console's highly successful Kickstarter campaign, and left it facing an uphill struggle for the rest of its short life. The presentation got off to a bad start when Ouya's CEO, Julie Uhrman, took a prototype console out of a small paper bag, which was intended to demonstrate how compact the system was, but immediately gave both the console and company an unprofessional image that stuck with it for the rest of its existence. Things then got worse when Uhrman openly stated that there was "nothing special" about the Ouya's hardware or software, as if it was somehow a selling point (even though it meant that anyone could duplicate their business model), and also behaved in a dismissive manner towards the AAA game model and claimed that mobile-style games was the future, only to then admit that she had no idea how many launch titles or exclusives the system had lined up. The presentation was so disastrous that half of the attendees had walked out by the end, and it proved just the first in a catalog of missteps that ended up burying the Ouya.
- The reveal of the Xbox One was an abysmal showing on par with the Sega Saturn E3 '95 presentation, caused by complacency on Microsoft's part due to the success of the Xbox 360. Instead of getting gamers even more hyped for its new system, the presentation was marred by two fatal mistakes that caused the mother of all backlashes against the Xbox One (or "Xbone", as it was eventually nicknamed) and prevented the system from establishing early momentum, ultimately resulting in the PlayStation 4 dominating the eighth generation.
- Mistake the first: Excessive focus on secondary functionality. The presentation focused on multimedia features - in particular DVR functionality and Skype calling - at the expense of games. The few games that Microsoft did show largely consisted of AAA blockbuster titles not exclusive to the Xbone. Microsoft's vision was an all-in-one entertainment device but gamers, the people who were most likely to watch the presentation, were obviously more interested in video games, with everything else being a secondary concern.
- Mistake the second: Needless, unacceptable restrictions. The same presentation also confirmed some rumors that were floating around and causing suspicion and worries among gamers:
- The Xbone would require an online check-in every 24 hours, or else it wouldn't work. This was a particularly bad and unpopular idea, considering the server meltdowns that SimCity (2013) and Diablo III had with this sort of DRM, preventing people from playing them due to the single points of failure which online requirements such as this one inherently introduce.
- The Xbone would have unprecedented restrictions on used games, charging players money just to be able to play a copy of a game someone else had purchased. This would have made borrowing games a hassle and potentially made it too expensive for some gamers to buy games for the Xbone.
- Every Xbone would come with a Kinect, a camera peripheral that was always on for the purposes of the "Xbox On" command, and would be required to be plugged in for the console to function. At the time, Edward Snowden had just recently exposed underhanded surveillance by the NSA and caused Americans to become concerned about privacy which earned the Kinect mockery. Obviously, the NSA was a political issue beyond Microsoft's control, but they could've considered people's new privacy concerns.note Interest in motion controls had also been waning over the years, partly because of the original Kinect; this, combined with the aforementioned terrible showing at E3 2010, meant the Kinect name was tainted no matter how much of an improvement functionality-wise this new Kinect was. The final issue was that it added $100 to the Xbone's price, making the console, already marred by the used game fee, seem even less economical.
- Then there was the Microsoft E3 2013 presentation. While it did have some games to show off to garner some hype, the botched reveal hung over the Xbone. This was Microsoft's best chance to turn things around in their favor. Instead, Microsoft at best dismissed concerns, and at worst showed outright contempt with Don Mattrick, President of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business, recommending non-online users stick with the Xbox 360. Not only did this go over like a lead balloon, but it allowed Sony to effortlessly upstage Microsoft at Sony's own E3 presentation by revealing that the PS4 would not restrict offline play or used games in any way. Sony even twisted the knife by creating an "instructional video" on game sharing where one person simply hands a PS4 game to another person as a Take That! to the Xbone's policies. As Jim Sterling pointed out, Sony was applauded for doing nothing different from normal, because Microsoft's restrictions were so consumer-hostile that Sony not changing anything was seen as a slam-dunk move.
The positive reaction to Sony's presentation brought Microsoft to their senses, if only because they saw how badly they were going to lose the upcoming console war. Before launch, Microsoft announced they would give the Xbone a day-one patch to remove the 24-hour check-in and used game policies.note Six months after release, Microsoft also came out with a cheaper Xbone SKU without the Kinect. Still, this course correction came too late for Microsoft to fully recover from the botched reveal, and the Xbox One's lackluster sales (an estimated 58.5 million units sold vs. the PS4's 117.2 million, as of August 2022) are at least partially attributable to the terrible first impression.note
Watch an extremely tired Angry Joe rant semi-coherently about the reveal (yet somehow manage to sum it up best) here. Josh Scorcher would later declare it, and the Xbox One launch in general, to be Microsoft's second-biggest failure, behind only the Red Ring of Death. Stop Skeletons From Fighting did an in depth retrospective of the launch.Angry Joe: You fucking idiots. I... I... no... this... I just... I can't even start! This is... This is literally the worst reveal event I-I've ever seen. This, literally... if you cannot bring the big guns, if you cannot bring the good stuff to your reveal, DON'T DO THE REVEAL! Wait until E3! - If there's a small silver lining to this terrible announcement, it's that this was the kick Microsoft needed to stop taking their gaming division for granted. The presentation was a Creator Killer for Don Mattrick, as he left Microsoft to become CEO of Zynga just two months after the Xbox One's announcement. His replacement as Head of Xbox was Phil Spencer, previously the head manager of Xbox's game studios, who was told upon accepting the role that Microsoft was seriously considering pulling out of the console market thanks to Mattrick's failure. Under Phil Spencer, Xbox abandoned most of the One's initial controversial features, began a spending spree on studios to build up the portfolio of Xbox Game Studios, and initiated a shift to less console-dependent services such as Xbox Game Pass and improved support for PC gaming. While many of these initiatives were slow to get going and the Xbox One-era as a whole was definitely a tumultuous period for the brand, by the time of its successor in the Xbox Series X|S, Phil Spencer's work had paid off in bringing Xbox back into the gaming limelight and finally shedding the legacy of the Xbox One's announcement, which remains a regrettable moment for the division. Even Spencer himself admits that the Xbone's time was an Audience-Alienating Era for the brand, and he has few positive things to say about it.Phil Spencer: If you were an employee in team Xbox, then you were [a part of a team of] thousands of people that work on the Xbox. But there's like a handful of people that stand in front of cameras, on the stage and talk about things. There can be a divide between, 'Why is that person saying that? That's not the product I'm building,' or, 'Why are we doing that? That's not what I think we should be doing.' The feedback we got from the employees, maybe said and unsaid, was, 'We've been working really hard for two years to ship this product. You stand on stage at this event and blow up all the good work that we've done by talking about the product in a way that's not really matching what the soul of an Xbox console is about and what our customers are looking for from us.'
- Very few moments in gaming presentation history live up to the infamy that was the Diablo Immortal unveil at Blizzcon 2018. The tone-deafness on the part of those who put together the announcement cannot be overstated:
- It had been six years since the release of the latest installment, and people were expecting Diablo IV. The presentation had all the weight of a new mainline game announcement, but as soon as the presenter started talking about mobile devices, you could hear the crowd's hype train grind to a halt. In what came off as a blissfully unaware Bait-and-Switch, this "new Diablo game" turned out to be a mobile-only release, presented to an audience mostly made of hardcore PC gamers. Not helping matters, they spent a long time talking about how the game was being co-developed with NetEase, a Chinese developer known for making mobile Diablo clones, which made Blizzard come off as cheap. To make things more awkward, the presentation was clearly rehearsed expecting cheers from the audience, with long pauses after every sentence. As it dragged on, the cheering just got quieter and quieter until the very end when the audience fell into total silence. You could see the look on the presenter's face slowly change as he realized this wasn't going as planned.
- Things only got worse at the Q&A panel, which took place directly after the reveal. One of the attendees came up and asked "Is this an out-of-season April Fools' joke?" to the presenter. Not missing a beat, the audience reacted with thunderous applause, which was the first time they showed that kind of excitement since before the game was revealed. In another infamous misstep, an attendee asked if there were any plans for a PC release. After being firmly told "no", the crowd loudly booed, to which their response was "Do you guys not have phones?". It was probably meant to lighten the mood, but came off as extremely dismissive and out-of-touch, as if the devs didn't understand why their audience would want to use their expensive gaming machines. Following this disaster, both "out-of-season April Fools' joke" and "Do you guys not have phones?" became Memetic Mutation shorthand for terrible gaming announcements, while the attendee who asked the question (dubbed "Red Shirt Guy" for what he was wearing) became a brief Memetic Badass.
- The backlash in the aftermath of the announcement was immediately apparent. Blizzard's stock fell over 7%, and the YouTube trailers for the game have dislikes numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Blizzard, to their credit, called for reworking of the game in response to the negative reception, and released an actual Diablo IV and a remake of Diablo II shortly thereafter. The backlash was so intense that updates on the game were rare up until it finally got a June 2, 2022 release, where it was playable on PC via cross-play through Battle.net.
- The final E3 conference ever held, the digital-only E3 2021, was the worst possible outcome for the conference all around due to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting game development and Sony, a platform holder, skipping E3 entirely for the second time in a row, leading to a shortage of exciting video game news. Scott The Woz runs down the whole event here. It wasn't a total wash, with the joint Xbox and Bethesda Showcase (the first since their merger), the Nintendo Direct, the Ubisoft presentation, and the parody presentations by Devolver Digital and Limited Run Games all being considered good to great, but one must wonder why these companies even bothered to show up:
- Serving as the first omen to some that a potential catastrophe on par with the Chernobyl disaster was in the making, Koch Media's E3 2021 presentation, held the day before the event itself, seemed more oriented towards advertising Koch to indie developers than advertising games to gamers. Less than a quarter of the two hours airtime actually showed the games (and even less showed actual gameplay footage), the rest being dedicated to interviews of the devs with the same scripted questions on why the dev choose Koch Media as publisher and how good Koch Media is. And even those interviews were marred by a cramped stage that made it look like the interviewer was lying on her back on the floor. The presentation closed on the highly-anticipated "PAYDAY 3 teaser"... which turned out to be a single artwork shown for all of three seconds.
- Gearbox Software's E3 2021 presentation, held after Ubisoft’s conference, had little to nothing of interest. Aside from Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, all Gearbox had to present was a trailer for Homeworld 3 that showed no gameplay, in-game footage, or even cinematics, a PlayStation 4 port for Godfall (already considered an unremarkable game in its own right), and a behind-the-scenes look at the Borderlands movie that could only be described as being painfully awkward at best and tenuous at worst, especially in regards to the interactions between Randy Pitchford and Kevin Hart, with the presentation as a whole becoming the source of online mockery.
- Square Enix's 2021 E3 presentation was near-universally panned by everyone who watched it. It began by showing off Guardians of the Galaxy (2021) for twenty minutes of its sixty-minute airtime, and the footage used showed numerous frame drops during combat portions of the game. While the game itself was fine, the fact that so much time was devoted to it saw people quickly getting bored. Then came the long-awaited announcement of the first six Final Fantasy games being rereleased... onto Steam and mobile phones only, which made many a Final Fantasy fan mad, especially those who owned a Nintendo Switch note . After that was DLC for Marvel's Avengers, an already divisive game by itself, which did no favors to people already burned out by what was being shown. Followed by that was a sizzle reel for a number of mobile titles like Final Fantasy Brave Exvius and NieR Re[in]carnation, and only after that did they get to Babylons Fall, the highly-anticipated Stylish Action title by PlatinumGames... which was immediately followed by the reveal that what was teased as a single-player Hack and Slash had become a co-op "live service" Action RPG akin to Destiny, Anthem, and Square Enix's own Marvel's Avengers, note which was met with immediate backlash from nearly everyone for taking what was a promising action game and turning it into another game following the "games as a service" model that people derided Avengers for using. Only after that was more information given on Life Is Strange: True Colors and the reveal of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, the latter of which became incredibly divisive for its bizarre presentation and having stilted and awkward dialogue throughout its reveal trailer. The presentations was finished then, but the troubles weren't, as Final Fantasy Origin was given a demo on PlayStation 5 immediately after... only for the demo to be inaccessible for the first three days because the files were corrupted. Overall, Square Enix's E3 2021 presentation left many disappointed by the tone-deaf announcements and the lack of highly-anticipated games like Final Fantasy XVI and Forspoken.
- Take-Two Interactive's E3 2021 presentation had the company stress the importance of representing minorities in video games. That would be fine and dandy... if it weren't for the fact that Take-Two had no games to show for it. The entire conference was them talking about representation and inclusivity in video games, and that's it. No trailers, no gameplay footage, no screenshots, no concept art, no talk about upcoming projects like Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto VI or the remasters of the PlayStation 2 Grand Theft Auto trilogy, no nothing.note Fans were predictably furious that they got a half-hour lecture instead of any previews of upcoming video games — the entire purpose of E3. As botched as many of the other companies may have been with their presentations, at least those companies showed something from their video game lines. Even people who generally agreed with what Take-Two was trying to say questioned why they thought doing it at the biggest video game show of the year was a good idea, since it may have done more harm than good thanks to the tone-deaf timing of the presentation. Josh Scorcher listed that as one of the biggest failures of 2021 in his video to end that particular year.
- Capcom's E3 2021 tried to set expectations by detailing exactly what would be discussed ahead of time, but that didn't prevent it for earning its own share of backlash. The announcement that Resident Evil Village would be receiving DLC was just that, coming with no footage of gameplay or any other kind of preview for it. Monster Hunter: Rise's DLC announcements and The Great Ace Attorney were thought to have been fine, but incapable of carrying a presentation all by themselves. The most derided part of the presentation, however, was the ten-minute segment on esports at the end of a presentation that was only thirty minutes long. All of this left many feeling like Capcom didn't have enough material to warrant its own separate event that year, and was trying to spread what they did have too thin.
- Finally, Bandai Namco's E3 2021 presentation closed out the event’s 26-year-long journey on a very sour note. While most of these presentations were bad, the ones that showed games at least showed multiple games and DLC, which warranted the event's existence. But Namco showed only one game, The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes, which not only had little hype surrounding it but had already been announced the year before. This is especially baffling since they not only had Tales of Arise set to launch that September, but were also publishing future Game of the Year winner Elden Ring the following year. But the worst part was that Namco didn't reveal that they would be showing only one game until the day of the presentation, causing anyone who didn't see this announcement to get their hopes up for nothing. The Internet was beyond livid when they realized Namco had almost nothing to show that year, and began declaring E3 2021 the worst E3 in history.
- All of these bad presentations combined wound up being the death knell for E3. The following two years had their events cancelled due to most companies involved in previous editions choosing to host their own individual showcases instead, with the upstart Summer Games Fest all but replacing E3 as the place for summertime gaming announcements. On December 12, 2023, the Entertainment Software Association announced the expo was done for good. Even worse, this meant the aforementioned Namco presentation of a single game was the last ever done for the conference, ending what was once known by many as "the gaming equivalent of Christmas" on a wet fart.
