After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last, the time has come to say goodbye.
Thanks for the memories.
Why, again? It seemed like it was still super popular with fans and the public.
It’s popularity was slowly waning and companies have been slowly pulling back on the marketing at the expo for almost a decade. Over the pandemic period the largest gaming names (Nintendo, Sony, etc) pulled out entirely and created their own marketing events of a similar style that were cheaper and easier to maintain while still accomplishing the same thing. E3 was left as a bunch of disjointed marketing events held around the same time. Geoff Kneighlys events ended up filling in the void it left over this period and E3 just never recovered.
When the pandemic effectively suspended E3, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft started producing direct videos. They haven’t been interested in going back.
I’m sure someone will do a full postmortem write-up on E3, but with this sort of thing, there’s a sort of inertia involved. Once something happens that pauses a regular gathering and makes everyone wonder “why were we doing this again?” there are times the gathering doesn’t come back.
E3 was king in the age before widespread social media marketing campaigns. You’d go to those shows to showcase everything to the media to generate hype at one of the biggest events of the year. Those journalists would then go back and write all about it, giving the upcoming projects hype and attention.
Now with social media it’s more effective for brands to run their own campaigns. You can spend millions on an E3 presentation or you can give streamers/YouTubers review copies for free and get a ton of good press.
Once the big companies pulled out it became a lot less attractive to go, then the pandemic seems to have put the final nail in the coffin.
Every year became a competition, and it was unsustainable. Companies could spend millions on their presentation only to “lose” and get their reveals drowned out because Sony announced FF7 or Microsoft got Elder Scrolls etc. On all sides there was a rush to be the winner of the year, and it led to more and more CGI trailers of things 5+ years away just for the big reveal moment. I imagine both Sony and Microsoft would prefer to announce individual games as they come throughout the year, so their reveal is the only big gaming news of the week and everyone is talking about it.
Probably after all major studios pulled out. Turns out dumping tons of money on huge marketing shows that usually turn out a ton of drama probably isn’t the best spend of money. It’s much cheaper to run your own announcements under your own control. The better game show for fans would be PAX.
Not to mention there’s the benefit to companies of being better able to manage the production of the announcements and avoid the random pitfalls that can happen at live shows. They can make sure the games they are announcing look their best and they can control their message. All three major console companies have had their versions of E3 failures that have led to major embarrassments for them in the past. They would rather not have that happen to them again if they can help it.
I miss peak E3. It was an EVENT. I’d read about it for weeks leading up to it and after.
Not surprised, it feels like E3 has been on life-support for a while now. Still disappointed to know that it’s over. Back in the day E3 was a highlight of the summer. Maybe it’s just nostalgia talking but classic E3 was just so exciting. All these major announcements dropping at once combined with all the booths showing off new games. It was just great. I guess we have the Game Awards and Summer Games Fest as the big gaming events, but none of them feel quite like E3 use to.
E3 was great before communication became constant. E3 used to be one of the only times you’d be able to hear from the developers themselves, even if they were highly choreographed speeches and interviews we still got something. Social media kind of took some of that magic away since we could hear from developers all the time. It took away their motivation to carefully craft messages and shows since they can now communicate with fans basically all the time.
Glad I got to go when the panels were good.
