At E3, game announcements are big news, but most games from last year are still unreleased

E3 2016 is right around the corner, with Microsoft’s press conference set for Monday June 13th at 9:30am PDT, with more press conferences and the E3 convention itself, set for June 14-16, to follow. Microsoft and others have already teased new titles to be announced at this year’s show (you can read our summary of what to expect to get caught up on all the latest), and as always we’re hoping for a few surprises, too.

But once all the hoopla dies down, game enthusiasts are left to wait for those much anticipated games, and wait and wait and wait.

Cuphead, one of the games announced last year, is still unreleased although this new gameplay video showed up yesterday

A new analysis of what was announced, and what is actually available now, from last year’s E3 has made it to a post on Finder.com.au, stating that 62% of games announced at the sum of last years press conferences are still not available, almost a year later.

Of the 38% of announced games that were released only 5% were released in the same calendar year (2015), with the rest debuting this year. Here are a few more quick facts that Finder.com.au teased out of the data:

• 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.
• 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.

We’re still waiting for Cuphead, and Sea of Thieves, and ReCore, and Gears of War 4, and of course that list of anticipated games is likely to grow next week.

So we’ll be wallowing in the hype of next week’s press conferences and news from the E3 show floor just like you, but the business of building blockbuster games has become so big, so complicated, and so expensive, and the hype leading up to them is so important, that once the glow wears off we’ll likely be left waiting once again.