E3 was last week and I do believe the dust has finally settled. I decided, for my own sanity really, to try to take things a bit slower this year with getting news up from the event. This was especially evident by the casual pace in which I got a good chunk of the premieres and trailers up that were shown off during the major pre-E3 press conferences.

In previous years, I would try to get news up almost as soon as something was announced during the conferences. This was not only taxing on me but it meant that a lot of news posts went up without much substance to them. By simply waiting, a few things happened:
  1. Actual press releases containing a wealth of details and, in many cases, additional media assets were sent to me via email from publishers and PR companies. These emails often came after the shows ended or throughout the rest of the week of E3. This slower pace allowed me to put news up that often contained details about the games that were just announced or additional details on games that were announced previously but shown off again at this year's E3.
  2. It also proved to be more beneficial for traffic to the site. In taking a more casual approach to the news posting, I wasn't always competing with the huge rush of other outlets that were also trying to be "first" to hit social media or other related feeds. Often this leads to smaller sites like ours getting lost in the shuffle. By spreading this news out over the course of a week, I would say (though I didn't fully look at the data in depth) that this approach actually helped us to pull in some additional traffic compared to previous years.

I usually talk about how we had X number of E3 related posts. For whatever reason I had it in my mind that the quantity of E3 posts mattered in the slightest. What I didn't really think about in those previous years is the fact that often times those numbers were inflated by the fact that I would often have to put up multiple news posts about the same game during E3 week. The first ones being the aforementioned "first" posts that had little in the way of content and the follow-ups that had additional trailers, gameplay, screenshots, and whatever text-based information that I eventually received. Plus, as I mentioned previously, those first posts were often ignored by most people because everyone was posting about them at the same time, all with next to no content and nothing really unique to offer compared to the competition.

That all said, this E3 was still one of the weakest in recent memory. There were poor showings from pretty much every major conference with the slimmest of exceptions for Microsoft's conference. Even with that, I am sure there are some things that I missed or forgot to post from last week. I apologize for that. If there is anything major that I missed, I'll probably realize it soon enough or just forget about it completely. That seems to be the status quo for how I do things anyway.