62% of games from E3 2015 press conferences still unreleased

As all eyes in the gaming world turn to E3 2016 in Los Angeles next week, we’ve examined the likelihood that the announced games will be out before E3 2017.

What’s life without a little excitement? The thirst in the gaming community for the next big thing is near-insatiable, and game publishers, developers and console makers love to constantly feed that desire. At the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3 for short) held every year in Los Angeles, gamers around the world are tipped-off on the big gaming experiences they will be able to enjoy over the next year. Or the next two years. Or possibly sometime in the future. Or maybe not at all…

Make no mistakes, these big E3 conferences are all about building hype. They’re about making investors turn their heads. They’re about sussing out consumer interest. They’re about making a particular console or brand look better than its rival. They’re about keeping an IP in the news. They’re about proof of concept. But they’re not necessarily about showing off a game you will actually get to play in the foreseeable future.

Things change; markets shift. Developers go down, new genres go up. Some games disappear completely (Prey 2, Fable Legends), some get delayed indefinitely (The Last Guardian, Deep Down), while others aren’t even intended to be a game at all (The Dark Sorcerer, Samaritan). We just assembled a list of games expected at this year’s E3 and already we have over 200 titles. So let’s take a look at last year’s conferences to get idea of what percentage of the announced games at the upcoming E3 2016 event will actually end up being released in the following 12 months.

Key Findings

There are six main companies that host E3 press conferences. Three are publishers; Bethesda, EA and Ubisoft. Three are console manufacturers; Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. In this list we have removed multi-format third-party games showcased in last year’s event, and kept it to only first-part games and third-party games that are console exclusives.

So when we look at the data, it shows:

• Only 38% of the games spoken about during the E3 2015 press conferences have actually been released.
• Of that 38% of games released, 33% weren’t released until 2016.
• Sony is the worst performer, with only one game released from its E3 2015 press conference in that calendar year – a small indie from Devolver Digital called Ronin.
• Sony also has the worst record for releasing games announced at its conference in the 12-months leading to the next E3, at only 23%
• EA and Nintendo are the most likely to release a game they showcase before the next E3, with 92% and 93% of their titles available respectively.
• Nintendo also released 83% of those games before Christmas 2015, which is the quickest turnaround by far.
• Sony and Microsoft did not release a single one of their newly announced titles from the last E3 in the 12-months since the event.
• Year-on-year, we are seeing a rise in games not being released following an E3 showcase. Our analysis shows 50% of Sony’s, and 60% of Microsoft’s E3 2014 press conferences did not see a release prior to E3 2015. These have increased to 77% and 63% respectively for this 12-month period.

Here is the full breakdown of the all the data