Nintendo has won this year's not E3 
Mostly yes. I'll get to that.
Sony's presentation was quite tame except for Astro Bot, which really doesn't look like it would push PS5 graphics that much further than PS4 so not a big win there, and still too much focus on VR2 games despite VR2 not being even remotely priced well enough to compete with Quest 3.
And Microsoft continues to not have any idea what the market wants, opening their show with 17 straight games featuring guns or swords, almost all of action genre, and finishing the show with 25 of their 30 games with this formula, without a single platformer, fighting, puzzle, or co-op competition game. There is no way they catch Sony if they continue to focus almost entirely on the action genre alone. It was nice to see Fable and that Winter Burrow crafting-survival game but most of the show was blah. The Indiana Jones game looks like it could be fun if its more game than cutscene. And I like seeing Dom return in the God of War: E-Day prequel.
The Summer Game Fest shows had maybe the best presentation of trailers, with something like 50-60 as I recall. Alot of these are indie level games with only a small chance of having a big following, but that was a lot of variety. The Dragon Age game really underwhelmed me.
Steam Next Fest just decided to show demos, and when I tuned in I couldn't figure out what was being shown because they had no on-screen labelling and they spent more time interviewing the players than actually showing the demo. So I quit after a couple of hours. An hour or two on each demo is way too long, and with only live feed and no way to rewind or watch previously recorded segments, it really hurt them here. They needed to package this better so demos shown in the wee hours of the morning don't get missed by the people interested in seeing more of some game.
Nintendo won by having the biggest heavy hitters. They've brought back Mario+Luigi which most people thought was dead after AlphaDream's bankruptcy - though I very much dislike the art style, where they've taken the blue highlights from earlier games and concept art and badly overdone them to the point that Mario's hat has more purple than red now, and the bros' wrists have a blue aura for no good reason. They had a new 2D Zelda that focuses on puzzling solving which BotW and TotK mostly neglect in favor of combat and adventure. They had the Dragon Quest HD-2D remake, though splitting into two releases and asking $120 for the trilogy as opposed to the current prices of $17 for mobile and $24 for current Switch seems to potentially be outpricing themselves. They had the only fighting game in the Marvel vs Capcom collection. They had a new Mario Party game, though I'm not sure why they didn't sit on this for new hardware release. And lastly the Metroid Prime 4 trailer.
What really hurt Nintendo, especially for the western direct, was how many games they
didn't show. We know from release dates, Twitter news, and trailers previously shown online or at Summer Game Fest that they left about 25 minutes worth of trailers out of the show. SCHiM for example was in both SGF and State of Play as I recall, but only made the Japanese direct. Other games on the near horizon like Ace Combat 7 and Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus made the Japanese Direct, but may now entirely miss Western directs because their release date falls before the September Direct (unless the release date is changing.) The Japanese had three quick-look sections to briefly cover the shorter trailers while the west had none - and I don't recall them ever not having one before. So now Nintendo is in a bit of a bind, with twelve games, some of them unique to Switch, scheduled to release before the next Direct that haven't yet been advertised in any Direct to this point. A mini-Direct or Partner Showcase in July is almost needed to cover all the things they neglected to cover this week. And if they were waiting to show off the new hardware in a September Direct so they could then have it on floor for players to test at Tokyo Game Show (September 26-29), that's going to take a healthy chunk of the September show, which means now all the Q3 and Q4 games that weren't covered this week are now at risk for being bumped off, too unless they have two Directs in September, one for games and one for hardware. So it seems like a bad time to be releasing Switch exclusive games because Nintendo isn't going to help you sell them. (But is willing to help sell the non-exclusive stuff that's going to be cheaper on other platforms, like Dragon Quest HD-2D.) Ultimately, if Nintendo has enough material to make 4 or 5 Directs in a year, why the hell aren't they?
I was also let down they did Donkey Kong Country Returns HD, which I thought to be the worst of the DKC games. Its been 10 years since a new DK game, and another port is not what fans want. And with the sequel movie arriving April 2026, they still need a new Donkey Kong to improve his image. (Of the five main characters, Mario, Luigi, Peach, Bowser, and DK, guess which one is the least well known to children?) So now its two Donkey Kongs in 2025 to early 2026 or else they go into the movie failing to prop up DK back to hero status, or else the movie should just totally drop him (which probably wouldn't be popular with fans either.) With a 10 year hiatus since the last new game, DK seems to have joined the likes of Kid Icarus (12 years) and F-Zero (20 years!) as forgotten series.
Recent Posts