When word of E3 2023’s cancellation broke on Thursday, Games Twitter went straight into obituary mode. Developers, journalists, industry insiders and fans shared their memories of the show; was underneath former E3 presenter Geoff Keighley, who went from a nostalgic showfloor photo to a crowing promotion for his rival Summer Game Fest event in a single tweet. Despite assurances from organizers Entertainment Software Association and events company ReedPop that they “would continue to work together on future E3 events,” the general assumption seems to be that there’s no turning back. “RIP E3” is trendy. E3 seems to be dead forever.
The revealing detail is that so many memories of great E3 moments hinge on events that weren’t technically part of the show at all. For every story of a connection that’s on the massive, noisy exhibition space at the Los Angeles Convention Center (like This one hereby former Polygon editor Arthur Gies), there were 10 more about the grandiose showmanship and hilarious failures of publisher press conferences that rallied alongside: Sony owns Microsoft about his game ownership debacle, or Shigeru Miyamoto appears with sword and shield to announce The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
There’s no doubt that these indelible moments and others like them arose out of the hubbub, fan excitement and competitive energy of the E3 show itself. But they didn’t really belong. They happened away from the exhibition space, at private events of publishers and platform owners. E3 was the reason these events came about. But now these companies have realized they don’t need it to continue.
So what went wrong? And is it really for E3 or can it come back?
E3 2023 was meant to be a comeback for an event that hadn’t happened since 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic had wiped out in-person shows, and attempting a digital event in 2021 had been a waste of time. ESA commissioned ReedPop, the organizer of PAX, New York Comic Con and Star Wars Celebration (and my former employer) to create a new, hybrid public and professional event in consultation with the exhibitors. It would still be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, but it would also have an online component.
Earlier this year, it became clear that neither Nintendo nor Microsoft would be attending E3 2023. (Neither did Sony, but that wasn’t a surprise; it hadn’t attended in 2019 either.) The show has historically relied heavily on E3’s presence for the console platform holders, and this came as a huge blow, though Microsoft said that there would be a showcase event before the show.
On Tuesday of this week, after Ubisoft also withdrew its support, IGN reports that other publishers refused to participate and the entire future of the event was in question. IGN’s detailed coverage indicated that exhibitors were frustrated by ReedPop’s slow communication of its plans for the revamped show, while ReedPop felt caught off guard and even “betrayed” by customers who were initially engaged and had provided very encouraging feedback early on .
Directing the rebirth and transformation of such a high-profile and large-scale event has never been easy, even for a team with ReedPop’s experience. It seems that things did not go smoothly and relationships broke up. But that’s probably more a symptom than a cause. There are several factors that contributed to the total collapse in industry support for its most famous showcase.
in a (n Interview with GamesIndustry.biz (a website owned by ReedPop), ESA President Stanley Pierre-Louis laid out in diplomatic but somewhat blunt style what he believes to be the reasons why publishers left E3. In short, the pandemic had messed up production schedules, meaning big games weren’t ready to be shown or announced, or their release dates were hard to pin down. Also, “economic headwinds” made it difficult to allocate the massive budgets needed to exhibit at a show like E3 (not to mention the need for a company like Microsoft to be perceived as frugal after laying off thousands of employees ).
Finally, publishers were still experimenting with how to “balance” in-person events with the digital marketing streams that had dominated during the pandemic but had gained traction long before that. (The first Nintendo Direct was in 2011, and Nintendo held its last in-person E3 press conference the following year.)
There’s no arguing about these points, as optimistic as Pierre-Louis has tried to put it. To put it more bluntly, as Chris Dring from GamesIndustry.biz did in one accompanying opinion piece this is half an insider’s account of E3’s collapse from ReedPop’s point of view: “In the end, the industry just didn’t want this E3.”
There are a few other aspects to consider that, unsurprisingly, Pierre-Louis didn’t want to get into. The first is that the E3 brand, powerful as it remains in the gaming community, has been tarnished. ESA had made itself very unpopular in the years leading up to the pandemic with ill-conceived efforts to make the show a public event and with a catastrophic data leak that exposed many members of the press and visitors to potential harassment. Sony already had enough, and Microsoft was pushing to host its own parallel event somewhere else, like EA had done a few years earlier.
Second, the E3 was just starting to look dated and wasteful. Video game PR was changing fast and E3 didn’t keep up. Even before the pandemic, a series of terrible controversies culminating in GamerGate had caused both the press and publicists to back away somewhat from working closely together, while editors and influencers began to place more emphasis on working with audiences to get in touch after the games were out the wild rather than during the pre-release hype cycle. There’s also the carbon footprint consideration of having half the industry flown to California during an escalating climate emergency. As Editor-in-Chief at Eurogamer, I was familiar with the incredible costs of sending editorial and sales staff for a handful of websites and YouTube channels to E3. Imagine what that would look like for a major publisher. Was it Really It is worth it?
This existential question has occupied the industry for at least a decade and is far more important than any more passing consideration of the economic situation, production plans or marketing plans. If E3 is ever to return – and the odds are against it – the industry needs to take a brutally honest assessment of the true value of the event.
I’ve covered E3 for many years, and while it was an ugly and transactional show in many ways, I still loved the experience. It had an exciting scale that could transcend the usual gaming community, it was an exciting hub for fans, and it brought the global industry together in one place like no other event – not even Gamescom or the Game Developers Conference. The access was unrivaled, and the energy generated by all those big reveals and face-to-face meetings was an annual boost in the arm for the entire industry. But were we all – contestants and fans alike – just addicted to the buzz?
We’ve stayed here before, although it wasn’t that dramatic. In 2007 and 2008, E3 was downsized to a much smaller, less noisy business conference due to concerns about cost and audience composition. It was cool and easy to get the job done, but nobody really liked it. In 2009, the industry was ready to make big bucks again: within a single day I saw Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Pete Sampras, Pele, Jay Z, Eminem and the two surviving Beatles promoting video games. Showbiz was back.
If E3 is to make another comeback in these more sober and serious times, it needs a much better reason than “Isn’t it fair? Fun?” E3 was an oversized event for a bullish young industry with imposter syndrome. Now the gaming industry – and the gaming public – must decide if they’ve outgrown it.
