The Electronic Software Association (ESA) has announced that the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has been discontinued.
A simple message posted to social media and the website reads:
After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last [that’s not quite true*], the time has come to say goodbye. Thanks for the memories. GGWP [Good Game, Well Played].
E3 had been on life support since the pandemic. The show was cancelled in 2020, moved to virtual in 2021 (which wasn’t well received) then canceled in 2022 and 2023.
The official end of the summer trade show isn’t surprising, but is a whimpering one for the once mightiest event in gaming.
The first E3 was held in the Los Angeles Convention in California in 1995. It was a huge success, allowing designers and publishers to showcase new and upcoming games on the trade show floor. Attendance continued to balloon over the next decade.
*The ESA experimented with a smaller venue in ’07 and ’08, capping attendance at around 5,000 (from well over 50k in previous years).
The overcorrection didn’t play well with publishers or consumers, and E3 returned to a larger format in 2009, while capping attendance at under 50,000.
Over the following years, publishers began pulling out of E3 in favor of hosting their own showcase events that could be streamed virtually to social media (and avoid the increasingly high costs of attending E3 as a exhibitor). Nintendo and EA both pulled out in 2013, marking the beginning of the gradual end of the convention, though E3 would sport record attendance in 2018.
In the late 2010’s E3 would lose a third of its exhibitors, including Bethesda and Sony, due to high costs and virtual streaming.
Then there was the one-two punch in 2019 and 2020. In 2019 a nasty data leak affected thousands of press and influencers when their information was shared online, leading to death threats for gaming media.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, forcing every convention to shut down. It was the final nail in the coffin, though it would take several years, until now, for the ESA to officially throw in the towel.
Replacing E3 in the last several years is Summer Game Fest, a digital event hosted by Geoff Keighley that encompasses the various publisher presentations over several weeks during the summer. The event has been well-received, and supports the digital streaming age.
