2K Games Not Joining the E3 Party

Earlier this week, Techgage reported that Nintendo would not be giving a press conference at this year’s E3, now it appear that 2K Games will be absent from the festivities all together. The news comes from 2K’s own blog site where it gave this statement: “While 2K will not have a booth on the show floor at this year’s E3 conference, we will have a lot of great news coming your way this spring.”

This does not mean that 2K Games is not releasing anything down the road, currently Sid Meier’s Civilization V: Brave New World, XCOM: Enemy Unknown for iOS and additional DLC for Borderlands 2, WWE 2K14 and NBA 2K14 are set to have additional information released through 2K’s own twtch.tv and YouTube channels.

2K Games is changing how it disseminates its game information, this is a good way to maintain control of what information is being released, especially where people can get caught up in the moment and say more than they should. This helps keep developers on track, making games and not polishing demos, which can take away from precious development time. The new Thief game is a prime example of this, where it took 10 months to develop the Game Developers Conference demo. The down side is that it reduces the amount of interaction between journalists and these developers to create sufficient hype around a game, especially for new intellectual properties.

I look at the names of what 2K Games is releasing this year and these are all ready established titles in the gaming industry, thus it doesn’t need to promote these titles as vigorously as it would have to for new intellectual property. I can only conclude that this is a way to cut costs, which is a good idea; why spend money when you don’t have to? When 2K need to push something, it will be back at E3 lickety-split.