The Electronics Entertainment Expo was finally taken off life support earlier today, its epitaph being a brief statement reading, “After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last, the time has come to say goodbye. Thanks for the memories.”
It was a long time coming. Games industry observers have wondered about the future of the show since PlayStation first pulled out of it in 2019. That same year, E3 accidentally leaked a document containing the address and phone numbers of show attendees, effectively doxxing a large portion of the games industry. In retrospect, those events were first in the series of dominos that culminated in today’s cancellation, with the COVID-19 pandemic dealing the show a mortal blow.
— E3 (@E3) December 12, 2023
Earlier this year, Rebekah Valentine and I broke the news of E3’s cancellation. The conversations we had leading up to that report painted a picture of a show beset by a lack of logistical expertise and declining interest from major publishers. Behind the scenes, publishers complained about the high price of running a booth at the show, which could cost millions of dollars. The Entertainment Software Association, the lobbying organization that ran the show, was described as “out of touch” with the evolution of the games industry.
“The E3 arms race to have the biggest and loudest booth led to increased budgets which became harder and harder to justify,” Tencent's North America head of communications Chris Kramer tells IGN. “One year at E3, I had the head of a company walk me out of our booth to point out another company’s monitor, expressing his displeasure that the other publisher’s screen was bigger and brighter than ours. The following year, the events team had to spend money renting a recently retired Jumbotron that came from an NFL stadium in order to make that exec happy. How do you track [return on investment] on a $5 – 20 million dollar booth that only exists for three days and is seen by 20,000 – 30,000 people?”
Kramer praises Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest Play Days, calling it a “much more civilized way to present new titles to games media” and claiming that it’s a “fraction of the cost of E3.” Another knowledgeable industry observer says that E3 has had a “hard time transitioning” in the current era.
“As consumers began to adopt digital formats, the need for a retail show for distributors declined. Coupled with already popular fan shows like PAX, E3 became this sort of cost-prohibitive show that tried to transition itself into an inclusive fan event too late,” they explain. “It was ultimately left behind as major labels adopted a straight-to-consumer digital showcase event that saved them a ton of money. COVID was just the final nail in the coffin but from what I could see and what I heard from colleagues it had already struggled for years to find its footing.”
The rise and fall of E3
E3 had certainly experienced its share of ups and downs over the years. When I first started in the media in 2009, E3 was coming off a miserable two-year stint as the “E3 Media and Business Summit,” with the 2007 show being held in an old hangar in Santa Monica. Journalists and developers mostly hated it. IGN co-founder Peer Schneider remembers the show being chaotic, adding, “LA traffic is real.”
The return to the larger format helped restore some lost excitement, and in the years that followed it became the single biggest industry event of the calendar year.
In its heyday, E3 was an exhausting but thrilling display of industry excess. A strong showing could buoy a publisher for months, while a weak showing had the potential to drown a game beneath an avalanche of memes and bad press. When Nintendo opted to pull out of E3 in 2013 and run its own Direct streams, the narrative was that it was sinking toward irrelevance. As it so often is, though, Nintendo was ahead of the curve.
What industry observers at the time didn’t realize was that the way we consumed games was already changing. If there’s a common throughline in the conversations that I’ve had since the news broke that E3 is finally dead, it’s that it remained stubbornly wedded to a format that felt increasingly outdated. Its big innovation was letting in fans in 2017, leading to overcrowding and security concerns. Sony’s decision to pull out of the show in 2019 dented E3’s prestige even further, leading other publishers to question whether the high cost of attending was worth it in the age of streaming.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck and physical events were canceled, the ESA was ill-prepared to adapt. A tepid digital showcase in 2021 was followed by an outright cancellation in 2022. During this time, IGN heard many rumors that the ESA simply lacked the expertise to put on a large-scale event like E3, with former ESA senior director of communications Dan Hewitt said to be one of the event’s main drivers. Hewitt departed for Gearbox in 2019, but confirmed to IGN in a message that he was E3’s lead from 2007 to 2019.
“There was a significant change in leadership at the ESA around 2019; the people that came in seemed to not understand the significance of the show, despite how much revenue it generated for the organization,” Kramer said. “The ESA completely dropped the ball in 2020 and 2021… then bowed out with the astonishing disaster that was their team-up with ReedPop for ’23. While the ESA tried to present a game face after the flop of this year, it was clear that their mishandling of the E3 brand had effectively killed it.”
The ESA’s lack of internal expertise led it to outsource the show to ReedPop, which had experience running shows like PAX and MCM Comic Con [Disclosure: I am a former ReedPop employee, having run USgamer from 2017 to 2020]. Speaking with people around the industry, one of the big complaints was E3’s lack of identity. It wanted to be a trade show, a business hub, a show for fans, and a showcase for new games, leading to an increasingly tortured format mashing all of those elements together. ReedPop’s solution was to create separate E3 Business Days that would be restricted to members of the industry, with Gamer Days being held in a separate part of the convention center.
Many publishers were initially on board with this new approach, with Nintendo of America among those said to be involved in the show’s planning. But as months passed and details failed to materialize, publishers became edgy. Nintendo pulled out of the show, later saying that it “didn’t fit into our plans.” Publishers grumbled behind-the-scenes that ReedPop wasn’t being transparent enough. ReedPop became frustrated by the games industry’s unwillingness to commit. By March, it was clear that E3 2023 was in trouble. Not long after, the ESA pulled the plug.
In the immediate aftermath, ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis blamed the show’s cancellation on “economic headwinds” and other issues, saying at the time, “First, several companies have reported that the timeline for game development has been altered since the start of the COVID pandemic. Second, economic headwinds have caused several companies to reassess how they invest in large marketing events. And third, companies are starting to experiment with how to find the right balance between in-person events and digital marketing opportunities.”
Guy Blomberg, who was the E3 business development director at the time and has since moved on to become event director of Dreamhack Festivals North America, is more sanguine about it.
“Everyone had a vision as to what E3 should be – how similar it should be to what it used to be, how much it should change, should it be industry focused, or open to consumer, digital, how to collaborate with folks like Geoff or IGN, etc,” Blomberg says. “I think we had some excellent ideas that would have made it relevant again, but in retrospect reviving it was probably a no-win situation, it's a brand that requires the support and enthusiasm of the industry it represents, and that ship had clearly sailed."
What the industry lost
After E3 2023 was canceled, reports emerged that E3 2024 and 2025 had also been canceled, though the ESA claimed that “no final decision” had been made yet. ReedPop and the ESA parted ways in September, with Pierre-Louis promising a “complete reinvention of the event.” The end finally arrived on December 12 when the ESA confirmed that E3, which it had run since 1995, was coming to an end.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Pierre-Louis acknowledged that times had changed, “There were fans who were invited to attend in the later years, but it really was about a marketing and business model for the industry and being able to provide the world with information about new products. Companies now have access to consumers and to business relations through a variety of means, including their own individual showcases.”
What is left are the ghosts of Reggie Fils-Aime saying “my body is ready” and Keanu Reeves shouting “you’re beautiful,” as well as the abiding sense that events like The Game Awards and Summer Game Fest aren’t quite enough to fill the void. Fans and industry veterans alike have paid tribute to the event throughout the day, with God of War director Cory Barlog among those who said he "loved and hated the show."
"[W]as on the floor showing the demo of the very first god of war so many years ago and got to see how excited people were to play this new weird game starring the angry guy with chains. truly changed my whole outlook," Barlog wrote. "RIPs to the E3."
was on the floor showing the demo of the very first god of war so many years ago and got to see how excited people were to play this new weird game starring the angry guy with chains. truly changed my whole outlook.
— the fake cory balrog (@corybarlog) December 12, 2023
both loved and hated this show.
RIPs to the E3.
? ?❤️ https://t.co/cymAG0rRJN
Without E3, the summer schedule has felt increasingly unmoored. Every publisher has their own showcase now, turning the summer into a marathon slog of individual streams, events, and announcements that often wind up drowning one another out. June 2023 alone had more than 15 streaming events, some with dozens of games to cover. If there’s any reason to mourn E3, it’s that the noise has overwhelmed the games industry, leading to deserving games being lost in the process.
“The biggest loss to all of us is that the concentration and spectacle of E3 meant that THE ENTIRE WORLD paid attention to video games for a solid week every year,” Kramer says. “It’s a shame that our industry will lose that directed attention and I’ll personally miss it.”
Kat Bailey is IGN's News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
