An unexciting E3

Reading this week Well Played column on Kotaku, I wondered why I wasn't excited at all by E3 this year ?

Here's what I know about E3 2010 :

• Sony and Microsoft are moving to motion controller, great, what a surprise. It's been one year since their first announcement. Sony has his Wiimote clone and Microsoft has a camera capturing the movements of maximum two players.
  If I summarize, the first is not much more than a Wiimote, so we could play Wii games in HD and the second prevents us to play with more than one friend at a time. You see something exciting their ? Playing in HD or with fewer people; I'd rather keep my Wii.
• Nintendo will reveal his 3DS but since I learned the 3D could just be an aesthetic feature, I lost my hopes. I was dreaming of 3D interaction with the stylus, something very cool as three dimensional touchscreen and allowing new gameplays.
• Also there will be a lot of new games at E3, but a lot of them are only sequels of sequels : Gears of War 3, BattleFront 3, Resistance 3, Killzone 3, Zelda XX... Not so exciting.

Well this was perhaps a quick and negative overview, but it make me wonder what E3 is all about now.

Of course it's perfect to do business, to shake hands and build huge booth too show your huge games. But an indie developer could have quite the same coverage with a little internet trailer or a developer diary video and no money spent.
Moreover E3 is the moment chosen for every big announcement, reducing the impact of everyone of them.

We could argue that its an occasion to gain visibility in front of general media, but I won't buy it. In fact video games are now a regular subject in magazines and newspaper, whatsoever in business, entertainment or crime pages. They don't really need this kind of event to be spoke of.

This remember me an initiative that was taken one or two years ago, when big editor use the money they didn't use for E3 to build their own mini-events. This way every editor had his shot with the media and made the noise they were waiting for. Perhaps it was a good move ?

To finish, some games announcement and even trailers has been revealed before E3, as Vanquish or Spider Man Shattered Dimensions are the first two examples that come to my mind. What is the meaning of E3 if new games aren't revealed during the show ?

So here is my question : at an era of fast and abundant information could E3 be has exciting has it was 10 or 15 years ago ? Is it still worth the costs ?

In fact, with Onlive or Gaikai new online services, the next big video game show could be online.
Everybody could play the new game demos and access the conferences live during their play sessions. It will be obviously cheaper and easier to set up. This will also allows attendees to avoid waiting queues before playing or watching the next big thing; and small developer to increase their visibility. I can't wait for it !