It used to be the most important gaming conference in the world — and it probably won’t be back

The Electronic Entertainment Expo — known as E3 — has been cancelled, the Games Industry Association (ESA), the umbrella organization that produced the event, year after year in Los Angeles, announced at the end of last month. The organization had to admit that the conference — which was supposed to be the first to be held physically since 2019 — “did not arouse enough interest” from game manufacturers and distributors and potential guests in order to justify a huge conference.

Anyone who has been following gaming news in recent months can get the impression that the writing was on the wall. In February, it became known that none of the three major console manufacturers — Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo had confirmed attendance at the event. Naturally, more companies pulled out of E3. Ubisoft, SEGA, and Tencent announced that they will not participate in the conference. “We decided to go in a different direction,” Ubisoft reasoned.

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz , the president of the ESA, Stanley Pierre-Louis, cited a variety of reasons for cancelling the event: the ongoing economic recession, changes in game development schedules as a result of the Covid crisis, and a tendency towards digital marketing, as opposed to physical.

But if the truth be told, the decline of E3 began years before the Covid pandemic struck and forced the organizers to cancel the event in 2020. A year later, the conference was held in a virtual format only and last year the conference was cancelled as well. In recent years, the position of the exhibition, which was founded in 1995, has solely survived as a kind of archaeological relic.

Before 1995, the gaming industry — more modest in its dimensions — was a small niche at the CES exhibition in Las Vegas, the most important technology exhibition in the world, which is held every year. Tom Kalinske, a former CEO of Sega’s American arm, recalled that in the early 1990s, the gaming companies were stuck in the back of the hall. “In 1991, they put us in a tent and you had to walk past all the porn sellers to find us. That year it rained, and because we were in a tent, the rain dripped on our Sega Genesis consoles. I was filled with rage. I hated the way CES treated computer games.”

So, as they got older and bigger, the major companies in the industry decided they needed their own conference. The first exhibition was nothing less than a defining event in the history of gaming. In those days, the two leading consoles — the Sega Genesis and Nintendo’s SNES — competed head-to-head. Sega announced at the beginning of the exhibition the new Saturn console at a price of 400 dollars per unit. A few hours later, Steve Race, one of the senior executives at Sony, took the stage. He was silent for a moment before saying one sentence, “$299,” and walked off the stage to loud applause. In one fell swoop, Sony turned the PlayStation into a bestseller and knocked Sega out of the race.

In the years that have passed, E3 has become a central battleground in the “Console War”, which Microsoft joined in 2001, when it launched the original Xbox. Where? You guessed it, at E3. In 2006, Sony made a misstep when it launched the PlayStation 3 alongside a $599 price tag, marking the console as too expensive. In 2013, however, the company launched the PlayStation 4, which cost $400 — $100 less than Microsoft’s console, which did sell fewer units than Sony.

One of the first turning points in the game show’s status came in 2017, when Nintendo chose to launch the Switch console during its own standalone event in New York. Sony followed suit and in 2019 announced the PlayStation 5 at a separate event. Microsoft did hold a press conference at E3 that year, but it only hinted at the launch of its new console.

In its early days, the exhibition brought together under one roof the senior executives of the industry, gaming newspapers and other experts in the gaming world who served as mediators for the general public. However, the internet and smartphones have changed the picture. The gaming companies slowly realized that they had virtual and direct distribution channels for announcing new games, which of course allowed them to forego participation in the annual conference in Los Angeles.

And surely after three major manufacturers, more and more game developers began to wander away from the annual game exhibition in favor of other events.

There is no need for signs and wonders on the E3 stage, when you can conduct a live broadcast on YouTube that countless gamers from all over the world can access and gain the same or even greater attention. Moreover, if in the past the exhibition was a magnet for industry executives — this has also eroded over the years. After all, who needs face-to-face communication when there are Zoom calls.

Don’t get discouraged: other physical conferences have managed to keep the embers burning. Today, the title of the world’s largest gaming convention has been transferred to Gamescom, held annually in Germany. Last year the exhibition hosted more than 260 thousand visitors. Whereas just last month GDC was held, the annual game developers’ conference, although it is less flashy than other gaming events.

Over the years, the E3 exhibition enjoyed its importance because everyone flocked to it year after year, and everyone flocked to the exhibition because of its importance. But once the gaming companies discovered that they could ignore E3 without suffering a hit to their sales volume, it was inevitable that the importance of the exhibition would be questioned.