Image: ESA
It's time to bid farewell to gaming Christmas: E3.
The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has officially been declared dead and buried. Its event organisers at the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) made things official this week, saying that, “the time has come to say goodbye. Thanks for the memories. GGWP.”
E3 was once the biggest annual event in gaming, earning a reputation for being ‘gaming Christmas’ thanks to its weeklong drops of exclusive game reveals, announcements, demos and more. The gaming expo was last held in 2021 as an all-virtual event, before further attempts to revive the event were cancelled in 2022 and 2023. The event will never return again, if the ESA is to be taken at its word.
E3 is officially over
E3 was once the games industry’s biggest event without peers, held year after year during the summer. Its sudden decline can be traced back to Sony Interactive Entertainment’s PlayStation skipping out on E3 2019 for the first time in the event’s history. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, E3 was cancelled entirely that year and most games publishers began to host their own streams and announcements online, which led to an increasing awareness that E3 might not be that necessary in the first place.
In 2021, E3 hosted an all-virtual event with less fanfare than usual, and certainly less of a presence on the show floor - where public demos and trade show-related activities would usually be held. Due to a re-emergence of pandemic cases around the world, the ESA opted to cancel E3 in all forms in 2022. At this point, Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest had comfortably replaced most of E3’s usual summer announcements, and other games publishers began to host their own E3-like livestreams around the same time.
The ESA put a new organiser named Reedpop in charge of E3 2023, before cancelling it yet again when multiple high-profile publishers pulled out. With E3’s relevancy now in question, the ESA seems to have decided to pull out of the game entirely and leave E3 2021 as the last version of the show to be held. According to an interview with the Washington Post, ESA CEO and president Stanley Pierre-Louis said:
We know the entire industry, players and creators alike have a lot of passion for E3. 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.
E3 was held from 1995 to 2021, marking the end of an era for most veteran gamers who kept in touch with the show’s announcements way back in the day. For now, Summer Game Fest will have to do.