The biggest week in games goes digital and Sony plays the long game in a strange, formative summer for the industry

This year, as it does every year in June, the biggest week in the videogame industry rolled around. And then it kept on rolling - well into the tail end of the month, and through half of July. We thought seven days of E3 was exhausting; two months of it has proved devastating to our very perception of time itself.

Technically, we shouldn’t call it E3. Back in March, just as Covid-19 started to take a firm hold in the west, the ESA cancelled the expo the industry has traditionally built its entire schedule around. Much has been made of the slow death of E3 over the past few years, as publishers and platform holders have increasingly migrated away from the biggest showfloor in the world and further across the sprawling concrete jungle of Los Angeles. We wondered in E335 whether this year’s show would “bring everything back together, or drag it even further apart”. With the advent of a global pandemic, it looked like we had arrived at our answer rather sooner than expected.

Interestingly enough, however, just about everyone with any kind of platform rushed to fill the vacuum. In a natural digital continuation of what’s been happening for a good while now, many of the biggest names in videogames broadcast their own shows in their own sweet time, Microsoft’s 20/20 event, EA Play Live 2020 and Ubisoft’s UbiForward among them. And then so did everybody else and their mothers: from IGN’s four (four!) all-day expos to the new indie-focused Guerrilla Collective, the Upload VR Showcase to the Summer Game Fest announcements from a newly-energised Geoff Keighley, who has clearly smelled blood in the water and is homing in on the at-sea events scene with all the terrifying efficiency of a shark that subsists entirely on world exclusives. Rather than making a mad dash across the city through LA traffic in a series of Ubers, then hushed apologies as we slide into our seat in an air-conditioned conference room five minutes past due, our show schedule this year went thusly: finish work for the day; make dinner; pour ourselves a drink; check Twitter; discover there’s yet another digital event thing going on that we have forgotten to pencil in; load up a stream while cursing our lockdown-addled internet connection; roll in late and half-cut. (On that last point, at least - plus ça change.)