E3 Is Officially Dead And It Won’t Be Coming Back
E3 2021 sign
E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is dead. The show ran from 1995 to 2019 uninterrupted, before being canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic and ran as a digital-only show with very little support from major publishers in 2021. And now it’s dead.
The news was revealed in an interview that Entertainment Software Association president Stanley Pierre-Louis gave with the Washington Post. It was subsequently confirmed on Twitter, with the official E3 account posting an image with the following 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. GGWP.”
— E3 (@E3) December 12, 2023
Pierre-Louis said in his interview that part of the reason for the demise of the show was the marketing opportunity provided by widespread access to video streaming. E3 has always been a marketing event, but when Nintendo started its Direct livestreams in 2011, the whole scene changed.
Nintendo stopped attending E3 in-person after 2013, and started to run its Nintendo Direct livestreams multiple times a year, bypassing the need for a big blowout of info once a year. It wasn’t long before other companies followed suit, often using a very similar format to the Direct, and now it’s a bit of a rarity for any major publisher to deliver major news any other way.
Still, fans did enjoy E3, and having dozens of games announced in one special week. Pierre-Louis recognized that fans will miss the show, but said that canceling E3 was “the right thing to do,” in the current climate.
“We know the entire industry, players and creators alike have a lot of passion for E3. We share that passion,” Pierre-Louis told Washington Post, “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.”
A number of shows are poised to fill the gaps left behind by E3’s demise, but Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest – which should be called Summer Games Fest instead – and The Game Awards are the main contenders, for better and for worse.
