I'm secretly glad it's imploding / has already imploded. I love the gaming section of GAF outside of any "debate" threads. It's legitimately the best way to get gaming news, insider knowledge, and some real proper analysis of industry trends. But that all comes at the price of the GAF groupthink, which is something real bad. Everyone there accepts all tweets by someone they've never heard of til 5 minutes ago as fact, and immediately acts against the accused without any evidence. Everyone there is boycotting the next big game because it features an admittidly shitty character design, or one of the 100+ designers did something questionable in the past. Worse of all, you say anything, no matter how sensible it is, that goes against this groupthink, and you're immediately banned after waiting months to get your account approved.

It sucks that I'm not aware of any source of gaming news as fast or as efficient as GAF, but I'm not sure I'll miss'em.

I think the problem with EA's conference, as was the case with previous years, is that even if they have something to show, Microsoft or Sony usually has that locked for their own conferences. As such, I have no idea why EA insists on having its own conference still when their biggest game will only be shown in Microsoft's conference, and their Battlefront showing did not need a show built around it.