Originally published at: Game trade show E3 in danger | Boing Boing
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The biggest problem with E3 is the cost, having booths and a large floor presence was insanely costly and the overall experience became really convoluted, noisy and overwhelming. While it’s kind of a bummer that E3 is no longer the event it used to be we still do have other great game related events like Gamescom, video game awards, dice awards, etc and the publishers own direct events as well.
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I am a (mostly casual) gamer and I don’t pretend to know much about E3 but I have followed the odd news here and there
For what I gather, lately the focus moved to attract “youtubers” and “influencers” and being crowned “winner of E3” by them, I assume that unofficial title did not come cheap as they don’t work for free
So I assume for the big companies is much better to organise their own event, where they can control the narrative without the pressure to have to put up an expensive show at E3 and being compared to others
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If even Devolver feel theres no mischief to be made, it’s dead.
So long E3, I never knew ye personally, but every friend who ever had to attend said you were a shrill, stifling, death march.
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Thank you. Not a single article I have read has speculated beyond “may have failed to keep up with the changing times”.
Yeah, companies were spending a lot of money to be at a venue they shared with hundreds of others, and thus having to spend even more money and effort trying to stand out, to break through the noise (that they had deliberately immersed themselves in). Big companies realized they could afford to host their own big events (cheaper, especially if they were online) and not have to compete for attention.
Smaller companies that can’t afford to host their own lavish press events might still find it useful, but the ability to easily host - and get people interested in - online events suggests the days of E3 are ending for everyone. Certainly smaller publishers that I’ve worked for in the past didn’t find it useful, and that was a long time ago.
That’s such a weird take, given how surprising it is that E3 has lasted this long. It was an expensive mess and opening it to the public made it worse, if anything. It seems like it’s only persisted because it was “what the industry did” and didn’t get questioned (like a number of other practices). The pandemic, and the success of online events (being both cheaper and more effective), was probably the shock they needed to drop something that never worked for them in the first place. (Or had been a very, very long time since it had worked for them.)
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Aaaand, it’s dead.
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Apparently there weren’t enough smaller participants to make it worthwhile to keep doing it. Sounds like they tried to fully shift it over to being a fan event, but that didn’t work. If it ever comes back, it’ll be as a fan event rather than the press event it traditionally was, but I suspect that’s the end of it for good. We’ve already got PAX and similar, so E3 really just doesn’t have a place anymore.
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All I know about E3 is the indie game devs I know who wanted to do a shared booth at E3 could do ALL the PAXes for the same price as one E3, and that made their decision easy.
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