News E3 is Dead - For Good This Time

[Dreadknux]

Was announced by the ESA a few hours ago on social media.

End of an era, I say. The show had its problems for sure (which were only exacerbated by the fact that it couldn't find a road back to reality after COVID lockdowns lifted) but it was a very special event for the gaming industry. Particularly for me, as someone who was lucky enough to visit for business a few times.

Let's dedicate this thread to our fondest memories of E3 - best conferences, worst conferences, things you love about the show and even slagging it off.

Hopefully something else comes along that captures the same gravitas and excitement as E3 - none of the replacement events or shows have really done that to date (sorry, Summer Game Fest).

RIP, E3!

[Failinhearts]

It's definitely a rough blow to see E3 just go forever. Never had a chance to make any sort of comeback, it's just... Gone cause of the state of the world. While yeah, I can't say the loss isn't without its benefits cause it allows for other companies to have full freedom to pursue conferences tailor made for them... That isn't to say E3 had no merits.

The elaborate setups, the demos, the grandiose nature of it all just can't be easily replicated by anyone else. And I know I've had my fond memories. As a Toys to Life collector, E3 was like a second Christmas when those games were still around. Toy Fair gives us a first glimpse but we FEAST on the character/toy reveals, the levels, the mechanics. I will say, E3 just wasn't the same for me after the fad died out, cause they are what made it most special for me.

Godspeed, E3.

[Xandur]

Wish E3 had gotten to go out with a bang - sucks that it ended up going this way instead. Even if it hadn't been cancelled, Xbox, Nintendo, and Sony weren't planning on showing in 2023 anyway. E3 was pretty much doomed to be dead on arrival this year, one thing led to another, and now we'll never get another one.

At least we'll still have TGA, but it won't be the same. Gonna miss it.

[Sega DogTagz]

The meme's bro.

Honestly it got to the point where you were looking forward to what stupid things were going to get passed around in the forums about whatever was revealed or not revealed. Good time to be had by all, and there really isn't another event or happening that brings fanboys from every side together into one place to stir that pot.

 

So yeah I'll miss that.

 

[Knight Terror]

[Indigo Rush]

Time to strike while the iron is hot, Summer of Sonic 

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Considering I've been hosting E3 streams on Motobug so SSMB members could watch it live for years (to the point it's a tradition now), I honestly can't say I'm very bummed out to see it go.

Don't get me wrong - in it's hayday, I loved E3 as much as the next guy. Even before the streams, PlayStation would always do a super fun thing on PS Home where they would recreate the booth digitally, and it was like it's own mini virtual E3 where you could explore, get unique cosmetics for your character, watch trailers, and even take part in little mini-games and hunts. It was always a fun little tradition for me when Home was running to explore every year and it was how I saw a lot of E3 streams with friends for awhile as well, as there'd always be a cinema set up in the game to stream it.

But then there was just some of the incredible streams themselves. Like seeing KH3 finally announced at E3 2013, something that hyped me up so much that I had it as my PS3 status for literal years, right up until release in 2019:

or hell, there was the triple whammy at E3 2015, where Sony just casually dropped THREE of the biggest game announcements right on top of everyone's heads back to back to back between Shenmue 3, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and The Last Guardian, still making a pretty damn iconic E3 until this day IMO. Even seeing stuff like FighterZ announced at Xbox's conference being so insanely faithful to the anime and manga was top notch. Spider-Man PS4, who could forget that one and how insane it looked when we finally got that first trailer.

That's also not to mention the less than good E3s, but the pretty funny ones, nonetheless - shit like the disastrous 2006 Sony E3 with the announcement of the PS3, with of course - RIDDDDDGEEEEEE RACER!

Remember that one?

Or the infamous Konami E3 with the weird wrestling skit, or all the numerously terrible Ubisoft E3s with their outlandish skits. Hell, how about going back to the 90s with stuff like the PlayStation's initial pricing announcement, or the infamous SEGA Saturn launch. 

But with all that said...I really don't see E3 having a point much longer. Bluntly (and I say this, knowing I am biased towards PlayStation), I think the death point was once Sony began pulling out with that one E3 where they simply focused on four big updates (TLOU2, Spidey, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Death Standing), and then pulling out altogether.

Sony/PlayStation was one of the three biggest heavy hitters the event had. EA, Ubisoft and so on are 'big', but Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are the big ones. It could handle having Nintendo take a reduced role via Directs, but once Sony pulled out and we lost their usually very packed events, E3 began on a massive downtrend.

For years, the show's reveal events were already getting pretty bad. Between EA's focus on sports, or Ubisoft's usual presenter skits/dance sessions/whatever. Outside of the big three, the show was going away from reveals and instead was trying to just be some big light show event, and eventually, losing PlayStation meant that was what most of the event became, unfortunately.

When it came back after COVID, it came back in a worse and more pathetic state than ever, and it was clear E3 was cashing in favours just to get something, with companies/developers seemingly pressured into making a show out of something - which is how we got a godawful conference on the Borderlands movie, or how we had Capcom do a conference that was literally some brief news on Great Ace Attorney, Resident Evil, and then a full blown segment on esports. Not to mention a freaking diversity conference from Take Two somehow being billed as a official E3 event, rather than just a internal thing. It went out with a sad whimper and nothing else.

The thing about Nintendo Directs is - for as much as people meme about Sony playing follow the leader - it's shown exactly why E3 is irrelevant. Why create massive extravagant events for one week in June, where you have to fight against 6-8 other publishers, developers, and companies for relevance, where the events are regularly ranked, and you need to bring your A-game in terms of reveals to do well, when you can just self-fund a much cheaper, much more focused stream - on your own dime, on your own time - and get all of the attention on a given day? 

It's what makes the most sense for companies at this point. Even the few times we have managed to get a big hyped PlayStation Experience, like the one that kicked off the PS5's launch - when they hit it out of the park, they hit it out of the park, much like Nintendo does when they have a jam-packed direct (Ironically, the one during the E3 time period this year was one of the best Directs in years).

I'll be sad that the event itself won't exist, especially with all the fond memories, but it's been in decline for years, and that's also including a gigantic PR disaster where they managed to leak out personal details of attendees and press as well. If it was one or the other, E3 might've had a chance, but being in a irrelevant world where they also have bad press on their names just puts it into a really bad spot.

[Ferno]

Gonna miss it. The several Nintendo Directs/ State of plays/ hijacked Good Year blimps with Geoff Keighley's face duct taped to them/ random trailer drops throughout the year that we get now are great, but it was still nice to have one big event that basically felt like the Super Bowl for nerds every summer. My favorite one was probably the one where the 3DS was revealed, but there's lots of other cool moments to look back on too.

[Dreadknux]

7 hours ago, Ryannumber1Santa said:

there was the triple whammy at E3 2015, where Sony just casually dropped THREE of the biggest game announcements right on top of everyone's heads back to back to back between Shenmue 3, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and The Last Guardian, still making a pretty damn iconic E3 until this day IMO.

I remember that year very well, only because all of that shit happened while I was on a plane TO E3! I decided that year to go to a music festival for the weekend ahead of E3 and then get an early flight out to LA on the Monday... I literally tweeted as a joke as I was boarding, "don't go announcing Shenmue 3 without me lol".

You can imagine the amount of "bruh" tweets and texts I got bombarded with as I got off the plane haha. It was like I had stepped into the twilight zone!

7 hours ago, Ryannumber1Santa said:

Or the infamous Konami E3 with the weird wrestling skit

My favourite Konami presence will always be this guy:

7 hours ago, Ryannumber1Santa said:

The thing about Nintendo Directs is - for as much as people meme about Sony playing follow the leader - it's shown exactly why E3 is irrelevant. Why create massive extravagant events for one week in June, where you have to fight against 6-8 other publishers, developers, and companies for relevance, where the events are regularly ranked, and you need to bring your A-game in terms of reveals to do well, when you can just self-fund a much cheaper, much more focused stream - on your own dime, on your own time - and get all of the attention on a given day? 

The fundamental problem E3 had was that its core purpose no longer fit with how people consume news/media, or even buy games anymore.

In the 90s, E3 made sense as a trade-only show, something specifically for news media, marketing execs and retailers. Back then, the only way you could find out about a game would be through a magazine (or in the 2000s, online websites like IGN). And the only way you'd be able to buy a game is through retailers like GameStop.

Today, neither of those things are true anymore. Nintendo's experimental Directs in the early 2010s was a way of exploring that, and they obviously worked so well that they continue to this day.

E3 sadly never bothered to pivot from the trade-only aspect of the show until it was too late, and by that point they had tried to fix things by 'bolting on' consumer ideas like Twitch booths and all this other stuff on top of the existing archaic trade structure. They had an opportunity to redo the whole concept but they didn't, really. A shame.

Mind you, while it's easy for me to point to things like SDCC and PAX and say "E3 should just be doing that", it's also easy to forget that E3's owners are the ESA, which is at its core a trade body for the games industry. So I can sort of see a scenario where the ESA would not be willing to go full-consumer without keeping a trade experience alive somewhere. It's a hard thing to square off, I guess.

[Spyx]

Man...I've never been to E3 in person, but I always watched every year with a big smile on my face, ultra HYPED about new announcements.

Especially around 2015 when Dishonored 2 got announced...i was at my first work job fixing PC's, I watched the livestream. I just could barely focus on my task at hand....I was SUCKED into the  Dishonored 2 hype. Oh man, especially when that trailer hit a year later !!! 

 

Goodbye E3, you were awesome

[SolidSurgeTT]

I don't really like video game trade shows in general anymore so I'm not terribly broken up. It's just something that seems inevitable, just like how game magazines (the only real reason that I thought trade shows should matter to consumers back in the day) have passed into the night.