When Sony announced last year that for the first time in their history in this industry, they wouldn’t be attending E3 in 2019, they obviously made huge waves. It didn’t take long for Microsoft to come out and state very explicitly that they, at least, would still be coming to E3 2019, and that they’d have many things to show at the event, subsequently publicly speaking about the value of E3 as an event as well.
Recently, while speaking with Microsoft executive Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb in an interview, Xbox boss Phil Spencer revealed that following Sony’s announcement, there were internal discussions at Microsoft about how they wanted to approach E3 2019- should they capitalize on Sony’s absence by going big, or due to not having as much competition to worry about, should they place less focus on the event as well and perhaps save some money? In the end, the decision was made that they would do their own thing, with Spencer boldly stating that at E3 2019, Microsoft is going to “be as big as [it’s] ever been”.
“There was obviously some news about E3 back in the Fall and we had a discussion internally of ‘should we go big? Should we save some money?'” said Spencer. “You know… what does that mean? We just said ‘No, we are going to do our thing.’ We’re going to go and be as big at E3 as we’ve ever been. I love that opportunity to be with our fans and the industry.”
What Microsoft has in store for us at E3 2019 is anyone’s best guess. There has been a lot of speculation surrounding multiple new hardware projects underway at Microsoft, while there’s also been rumblings that they’re not done with first party studio acquisitions just yet. Then there’s games like Halo Infinite, and any number of unannounced titles that might be in development at one of their studios, that we might be hearing more of at the show in June. Whichever one of those things ends up taking the stage at E3 2019, one thing we can be sure of is that the show presents a great opportunity for Microsoft to establish a solid foundation for themsleves for the next few years in the industry.
