Giving the green light
It seems like it should go without saying, but you can’t really take this sort of thing for granted anymore: Xbox will be at E3.
After Sony confirmed yesterday that it’s pulling out of E3 again this year, Xbox head Phil Spencer tweeted that it’s business as usual for Xbox:
Our team is hard at work on E3, we look forward to sharing with all who love to play what’s ahead for us. Our artform has consistently been propelled by the cross-section of creativity and technical progress. 2020 is a milestone year in that journey for Team Xbox. #XboxE3 #E32020
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) January 14, 2020
The PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X will be the two topics that hang over the entire industry for the whole year. It’d be weird if both of them were absent from E3. But Microsoft will seemingly do the press conference, hold a fan event, give press presentations behind closed doors — all the stuff Microsoft has keyed in on for years now. E3 may be slipping further and further into irrelevance, but it won’t become completely irrelevant until allthe biggest names decide the show’s not worth their time.