Again ditching Cologne for Paris
Here’s an under-appreciated fact about the video game marketing cycle: PlayStation usually holds four press conferences during any given calendar year. E3, Tokyo Game Show, Paris Games Week, and PlayStation Experience all have proper pressers and they all happen within six months of one another. That’s bananas.
While E3, TGS, and PSX are all foregone conclusions, it’s always a little up in the air as to what Sony plans for European conventions. In recent years, it has given up on gamescom and turned to Paris Games Week as the spot to really appeal to its European audience. That will hold true again in 2017.
Today, PlayStation began sending out invites for its Paris Games Week media event. It takes place on Monday October 30 at 17:00 CEST (8am Pacific). Some candidates for games we might see are: Detroit, God of War, The Last of Us 2, Media Molecule’s Dreams, Days Gone, some VR projects, and, of course, Spider-Man.
As for gamescom, this is the third consecutive year that PlayStation isn’t revealing anything new at Europe’s largest video game convention. The most recent presser it held at gamescom was in 2014, the year that PT was announced and immediately released.
Xbox has a marginally larger gamescom presence this year, as it’s holding a live event in Germany. It’s not the sort of thing that qualifies as a press conference, but Xbox has said that new information will come out of the live show. It’s becoming more and more clear that the biggest platform-holders don’t see Europe’s biggest game convention as the right place to reveal new stuff.
