The Entertainment Software Agency has finally made official what we all basically knew: E3 is dead and it isn’t coming back.
“After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last, the time has come to s🌃ay goodbye,” the ESA said . “Thanks for the memories. GGWP.”
E3 was canceled in 2020, returned for an online-only event in 2021, and then was canceled again for 2022 and 2023. Also, earlier this year, the ESA dඣeclined to rent the Los Angeles Con꧒vention Center for any upcoming years. So, the ESA’s announcement is not, in any real way, unexpected.
But the timing of the announcement highlights the void E3 is leaving in its absence. Last week we watched 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Game Awards fail to honor developers with a ceremony that was long on celebrity riffing, trailers, Saꩵmsung ads, Muppet skits, and musica༒l performances, but relegated most awards to unceremoniously speedread cluster announcements, and allowed the few developers that did get to see the stage a mere 30 seconds before hitting them with the “Please Wrap It Up” sign.
Geoff Keighley has taken over the calendar with events in the summer and the winter, but even combined, they don't accomplish everything that E3 did. The late trade show wasn't perfect, and was doing poorly even before COVID hit. I never got to go, but I listened religiously to coverage of the event from the people who were there, and all anyone could talk about in 2019 was how empty the show floor looked, how different the vibe was from years past. It isn't much of a stretch to say that E3 was already dying, the pandemic just put it out of its misery.
As flawed as the show was, it provided a service that Geoff Keighley's many replacements have not proven able to do. It offered a moment when all eyes were on the industry, when its biggest players were in the same physical space as new developers hoping to make it into games. It provided the same opportunity for young journalists hoping to cover games full-time. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Summer Game Fest may kick off around the time that E3 typically took over L.A., but the event doesn't have the same draw that made E3 powerful. Though Summer Game Fest has the participation of heavy hitters like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Microsoft and Ubisoft, Sony and Nintendo are still doing their own thing at other points in the year. Instead of a concentrated blast of gaming to give the industry a shot in the arm and to bring everyone together for networking, gaming news is now a slow barrage where no individual event seems to feel much pressure to deliver anything of note. That largely happens online, too, so the networking potential of E3 hasn't been replaced, either.
Prior E3's demise, Geoff Keighley partnered with the ESA on an event called E3 Coliseum.
That lack of pressure is 🔴a big part of the problem. For most of its life, publishers felt the need to be at E3 to maintain relevance, to recruit, and to see what the competition was up to. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft saw the event as an annual chance to impress with new game announcements. As E3 waned in significance, that pressure waned, too.
That has benefits, like studios not having the pressure to crunch to make smoke-and-mirrors demos of content that may not even make it into the final game. But, it also means that publishers communicate less frequently with the public. Can anyone genuinely say, for example, that they have any idea what Sony’s next year will look like? I do this for a living and, aside from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth (a third-party exclusive), I can’t. Meanwhile, Sony's last E3, in 2018, had the publisher giving extensive looks at its four biggest upcoming games. I don't want to inflate the importance of what is, in effect, long form advertising, but for an industry as notoriously secretive as the games industry, it seems bad to make it even easier to remove the pressure to communicate.
Now that E3 is truly dead, the press and developers need to put greater pressure on Keighley to deliver something more substa🔜ntial with his shows. Keighley has appointed himself the PR man for all of video games, but his current offerings are eliding much of what E3 accomplished.
Opening Night Live can keep doing what it's doing, it's just a showcase for trailers. The Game Awards should place a greater emphasis on honoring developers and less emphasis on celebrities working the crowd. But Summer Game Fest is the piece of Keighley's roster that needs the most work. Though SGF has morphed to now include developers demoing games, it needs to incentivize the biggest players to participate when everyone else is. E3 was crucial in making connections, and right now, Summer Game Fest can't deliver on that. If Keighley is going to replace E3, the thing he offers shouldn't be a lesser version of what we left behind.
I Don't Have Any Hope Left That The Game Awards Can Change
After ten years it's time to accept that The Game Awa♊rds are never going to be more than a marketing event.
