My take on the conferences: (Sorry for the book)
MS: I felt MS played it very safe. They didn't do anything but games, I got the impression that they were avoiding saying anything that would make it seem that they were anything but a game machine. Two things stood out about this they never actually mentioned the Kinect by name and never once mentioned the "Cloud", instead calling it XBox Live. Their pacing was very good, it flowed nicely, unlike Sony's which ebbed and flowed. To me the games weren't all that spectacular. They really didn't show much of anything that if you weren't going to buy a One already, that would make you say I got to go and buy one, certainly not anytime soon. Sunset Overdrive looked interesting, although I am very surprised that no one seems to have mentioned it, but to me it screamed like a new generation, re-skinned version of Ratchet and Clank. Except for shooting from the rails and going back and forth, a lot of the mechanics seemed very similar. Not that it's a bad thing. I personally will be keeping an eye on Scalebound, but without knowing too much about it right now it's hard to get too excited. Overall I think their presentation was a solid one, but not an overly exciting one, unless you were specifically looking forward to the games mentioned and/or already an owner or planned to get a Xbox One in the near Future.
EA: EA tried to be different in that instead of just confirming that certain games exist they had developer diaries about said games. The problem is that the diaries while nice didn't give much information, if any at all. They would have been better served just by having the CEO or whomever confirm the list of games that were in production. It seems though that if they didn't do the diaries the presentation would have taken maybe 15-20 minutes and with most of their games being shown at MS or Sony's conferences there wouldn't have been much of a reason to have one. I will say that while we'll see how it truly turns out the new CEO seemed like he did want to make "better" games, but with EA being such a "company" we'll just have to see how it turns out for him. EA probably would have been better served just releasing trailers instead of having a full fledged conference.
Ubisoft: I didn't see their conference, so I can't give my thoughts.
Sony: Sony has never completely learned that the conference is more of a hype machine than an actual business presentation. So as I said before the pacing was very uneven and them including certain things (i.e. the Powers show) in the actual presentation seemed out of place. It would have been one thing if they had 5 or so shows or movies that will premiere on PSN, but it was only one, so it was very out of place. They could of easily held that out and issued a press release for it. I was also disappointed that the PS3 and especially the PSVita didn't really get any airtime on games. They could have at leazt made a sizzle reel with games that are coming out for the respective systems, especially since they did one for Free to Play games (with the hilarious caveat that some features might require a fee). I don't really know why they even mentioned Project Morpheus at this point, it isn't like it will be released anytime soon. From my perspective, when they were talking about the PS camera and how "successful" it was, I really thought they were going to announce that it would be included in the PS4 going forward, but they didn't. As for games, there were a couple of reveals, like LBP3, although I wouldn't think that nobody knew is wasn't coming eventually. Some might feel differently, but I liked that the demonstration fro LBP3 had mistakes and such. It made it feel very unscripted and you could tell that they were actually playing the game. Too many time to me, when they have gameplay demos I sometimes think that the people they have standing with the controller are just that, standing with the controller and we are all just watching a film of a runthrough, too many look too perfect, maybe that is just me. Gamewise nothing blew me away, No Man's Sky looks interesting, but I'll need to see if it is anything more than just flying around from place to place. Uncharted is, well, Uncharted, but the visuals... Overall, I think Sony had newer stuff to show, but the inclusion of some items and the general pacing of the show really dragged it down. As with MS, I don't think Sony really showed anything that would warrant people to say I need to go and buy a PS4, if you weren't already inclined to do so.
Conclusion: I think both MS and Sony's shows were about even this year, nobody "won" so to speak. However for different reasons. Most of what MS showed was either known or multi-platform, but they showed it in a coherent and more interesting manner. Whereas, Sony is pretty much the opposite, they seemed to have more pop as for what they were showing, but how and when, during the show, they showed these items left something be desired. Overall, it was a pretty unsurprising and, I guess, meh E3 so far.
