NintendObs Thinks: Why there will not be a Nintendo Direct "E3 2022."
A tentative roadmap for the Directs to come until the big show's big return this September.
I’ve been on social media a lot more often than usual lately, Twitter and recently Reddit. It’s something I used to avoid doing and for the most part still avoid doing not only in order to cultivate my own ideas about the videogame industry with a limited amount of influence, but also to prevent myself from facing the consequences such influence has on the way other players perceive Nintendo within the gaming world. One thing I’ve noticed which caught the most my attention is that even though E3 2022 has been entirely canceled, an apparent majority of people online believe Nintendo will still have a full-fledged Nintendo Direct this June, despite obvious evidence of the contrary since Nintendo did not air such an event in June 2020 when E3 that year was also annulled.
This should have been enough for anyone to be convinced of what I believe is not going to happen, but what truly put the final nails in this coffin in my view are the release date announcements for Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Splatoon 3 which were revealed a few days apart a week ago. These are the kinds of major news Nintendo would drop conjointly in a Nintendo Direct and could have easily done so this June given how the respective launch dates of July 29 and September 9 would still be reasonably far away. Consequently, Nintendo not having saved these announcements for a bigger impeding event is a clear sign that such an event is indeed not planned to be broadcasted.
Like every year, I am positive that Nintendo was assembling a Nintendo Direct for what would have been E3 2022. Now, what I’m seeing is they’re simply retooling complete and incomplete contents from that canceled Nintendo Direct and will be delivering them one by one in the timings they see fit instead. This second trailer for Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a perfect example of that with a trailer finished long before this original deadline, while Splatoon 3’s release date revealed with easy-to-make footage of turf war gameplay from start to finish relates to Nintendo having to hasten an announcement that wasn’t ready as intended yet, since they would no longer expect to declare it this June 2022. That’s only the tip of the iceberg, so now let’s look at why Nintendo will not have a Nintendo Direct "E3 2022" and also why actually for the same reason they did not have a Nintendo Direct "E3 2020."