Come on. E3 is great publicity. There is no good excuse to say Sony did the right thing by skipping E3. Please believe if Sony had enough news and content to share this year that they would be at E3. It's a slow year for them for Playstation. It's all business.
Sony probably could have hit E3 this year with:
Death Stranding playable demo, or at least that 8 minute trailer.
A longer format TLOU2 trailer.
A longer format Ghosts of Tsushima trailer.
Demos of Dreams in action, along with sneak peeks at what their creative teams are doing with the tools for full release.
More info on Concrete Genie, maybe even a playable?
Playable demo of Iron Man VR
In short at least a solid showing of first party exclusives. Then add in the 3rd party padding they had done every year prior to E3 2018 and whatever else is in the pipe ready to be announced but instead wasn't and you'd have a solid show.
Sony aren't geniuses for skipping or something, but it was the right choice. They'd be showing off a lot of titles we all already know about, they clearly have less interest in talking about next gen hardware compared to Microsoft, and they don't have any major new services features to announce.
Sony is in victory lap mode. Saving a few million dollars on an E3 event that wouldn't have moved the needle for them is the right call. Not a big deal, except for pointing out how little importance E3 specifically is to the industry now, but a minor net positive for them when they'll want to go all out when they do go public with the PS5.
I was in the should've showed something camp till I actually watched the conferences. I think not showing up is better than what EA, Ubisoft, and Microsoft did.
I think MS had a good show. It was light on exclusives but it delivered where MS wants to be: as the standard barer of games as a service distribution via GamePass, showing early signs of XCloud to key people, etc.. They also have begun to paint the picture of what the road ahead looks like for their brand and the lack of Sony there let MS sweep the third party reveals on their stage.
EA could have done the only really noteworthy thing at their show (Star Wars) within MS' conference.
Ubisoft had Watch Dogs, Gods and Monsters, and UPlay+. About as a solid a year as they'd normally put up. They could have held back the new Ghost Recon a bit longer to pad the list but not shockingly empty or something.
