Industry Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is Officially Dead

[Raine]

Article:

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), once held every summer as the games industry’s biggest convention, is officially dead, the Entertainment Software Association confirmed.

“We know the entire industry, players and creators alike, have a lot of passion for E3,” said Entertainment Software Association president Stanley Pierre-Louis told The Washington Post. “We share that passion. We know it’s difficult to say goodbye to such a beloved event, but it’s the right thing to do given the new opportunities our industry has to reach fans and partners.”

The Electronic Entertainment Expo website now features a single page with the goodbye message: “After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last, the time has come to say goodbye. Thanks for the memories.”

The Electronic Entertainment Expo’s decline began in 2018, when Sony Interactive Entertainment decided to pull out of the event, which started a domino effect of other exhibitors no longer attending. In 2020, longtime collaborator and journalist Geoff Keighley announced that he would no longer be working with the show, and has since created his own separate event with Summer Game Fest.

The final in-person Electronic Entertainment Expo was held in 2019, which allowed attendance by the general public. While there were plans for a 2020 event, it was canceled due to COVID-19 concerns. A digital-only event was held in 2021. And while a digital-only event was planned for 2022, that too was canceled. A revamped event was planned for 2023, but that was canceled.

Source: https://www.gematsu.com/2023/12/e3-officially-dead-after-more-than-two-decades

 

[Raine]

A bit late to the party with this, but oh well. Writing has been on the wall for a while, and it'll probably try to do a revival in a couple years anyway. The Summer Game Fest and whatnot just doesn't hit the same and is too disorganized and spread out.

Let's remember some times we got stupidly excited for commercials together:

 

[TD]

I uh..

Didn't remember it even existed.

 

[Raine]

I uh..

Didn't remember it even existed.

But... but there was so much?!

 

[TD]

But... but there was so much?!

I should've rephrased that.

I didn't realize it wasn't already dead.

 

[Raine]

I should've rephrased that.

I didn't realize it wasn't already dead.

Haha, yeah, that's absolutely fair. It was... basically dead. For better or worse.

RIGHT, SONY?

 

[Rachel]

I need to rant for a second.

I decided to watch a lot of the game awards. We never had a thread about it (solely).

IMO it needs to be either a convention with announcements and trailers or an awards ceremony. It's trying to be both.

It's almost criminal how little time they gave the devs for the acceptance speech. For God's sake Sven was talking about the guy on their team who died when the music started playing!

And for a ton of the categories he was like, yeah here is who won. Wtf??

Then they do a weird skit with a Muppet and suck off Kojima for ten minutes!!

 

[Raine]

IMO it needs to be either a convention with announcements and trailers or an awards ceremony. It's trying to be both.

It's almost criminal how little time they gave the devs for the acceptance speech. For God's sake Sven was talking about the guy on their team who died when the music started playing!

A large part of the reason I think I've only ever watched TGA once, and from then on just looked up the reveal trailers later. Allegedly this year was super rushed in dumb and expressly crude/toxic ways because they 1) booked too much nonsense (like the Kojima thing wherein he didn't even have a game to show) and 2) massively over-corrected because last year this happened:



...And instead of leaning into that (because the internet liked it) or just setting some, like, more reasonable time limits - you can't give everyone 8-ish minutes feasibly - we got whatever the fuck happened last week.