Regardless of whether or not you’re a PlayStation owner and/or fan, it’s hard not to admit that the company’s complete absence at E3 left something of void. While the show itself was alright, Sony has been there in some form or another since the beginning. It’s still not entirely clear why they chose to skip the show. Some people thought it was test the waters for their Direct-style State of Play as a replacement for a traditional press conference. It could just be that, looking at their release schedule, they didn’t have enough for a full conference. Regardless, skipping conferences won’t be a standard, it seems, as the company is back on the trail.
It’s been confirmed by Sony that they will attend both Gamescon (August 24-29th) and the Tokyo Game Show (September 12th-15th), the biggest European and Japanese based game conferences respectively. Not only that, the company will host a conference on August 1st called Chinajoy, made to highlight games that are Chinese funded games that are planned to eventually make it to the global stage.
Whether or not Sony’s skipping E3 this year was some kind of test to do away with full scale conferences remains to be seen. If they skip the 2020 show even with new hardware to be shown off, that might very well be the case, but for now Sony is back in the conference game.