The chaos of last week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles is behind us, but we still have a major duty to fulfill: the non-awards!
You see, while most publications will focus on mentioning the games with the best graphics or interesting gameplay, we like to give shout-outs for the sort of stuff that no one else is really bothering with. Some of our non-awards recognize cool moments, some focus on awkward gaffes, and some even complain about doughnuts.
Welcome to the GamesBeat E3 2015 Non-Award Awards! (Here’s last year’s choices).
We see a lot of promotional items at E3. Companies plaster their logos on T-shirts, pens, stress balls, and more. This year, Microsoft’s Xbox team got a little creative by making small green boxes filled with hundreds of business cards. But I think they overestimated how much people would want them.
Each box contains 300 cards that represent independent developers who are publishing their games through the ID@Xbox program. On the back are QR codes that lead directly to the developers’ websites. It’s a neat idea in theory: The box shows just a small sample of the huge library of indie games on Xbox One.
But the last thing journalists want to carry around while running back and forth across the L.A. Convention Center is a hefty box of cards. I realized my mistake a few minutes after I grabbed one and tried to stuff it next to the laptop and portable chargers in my backpack. I left the cards at my hotel for the rest of the show.
They’re also an incredible waste of paper. At Microsoft’s media showcase the night before E3, I saw a bunch of boxes scattered throughout the venue. I felt bad for whoever had to clean that up. And inside a meeting room for one of the ID@Xbox games, Microsoft still had a mountain of boxes on the floor. I highly doubt it was able to give all those away before the show closed.