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For over 25 years, E3 (which stands for Electronic Entertainment Expo) was the world‘s largest video game trade show. The first edition was held in 1995 at the Convention Center in Los Angeles and, albeit with mixed fortunes, has always represented the moment of greatest visibility for the video game industry. Due to various factors, both contingent such as the pandemic and structural such as the very high costs of organizing the fair, in recent years, however, E3 has lost part of its importance and had to cancel this year’s edition. It is the third in four years that has not taken place, if we consider those that have not been there due to the pandemic.
E3 is a trade fair, ie an event dedicated to a specific sector, that of video games, aimed only at insiders and the press, which since 2007 has always been held between the first and second week of June. The objective of the fair and of ESA (Entertainment Software Association, the trade association of US publishers and developers), which organizes it, is to concentrate as many developers and publishers as possible in one place in order to be able to communicate more effectively what what’s going on in the industry. Similarly to what happens for other major events (such as for the Salone del Mobile in Milan, at the same time as the Fuorisalone is organised), ESA and the individual exhibitors create a series of events around the fair which serve to attract attention not only of the trade press but above all of the generalist one.
The 2023 edition should have been the one of the relaunch: ESA had in fact commissioned ReedPop, the organizer of Comic Con in New York, to design a new type of event, which was both physical and digital and which focused not only on the press and insiders but also on the public. To be able to organize an event of this type, however, the commitment of the major publishers (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts and 2K) would have been necessary, who would have had to occupy and set up the spaces at the fair by presenting their video games, and who instead, starting from the first months of 2023, they have gradually been paraded. After the renunciation of Microsoft, Nintendo and Ubisoft (Sony had not even participated in the 2019 edition), at the beginning of April ESA and ReedPop had communicated that the 2023 edition of E3 would not be held, however suggesting that they will try again organize it next year.
The Nintendo sector at E3 2018. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
Some of the reasons why major publishers have decided not to participate in this year’s fair are summed up by ESA President Stanley Pierre-Louis, who in ainterview a Games Industry.biz (owned by ReedPop itself) highlighted how the impact of the pandemic on video game development was the main reason for the defections that led to the cancellation of the fair. According to Pierre-Louis, several companies have found themselves having to substantially change their way of working, which has had repercussions on development times and consequently on the release dates of many video games. For the period of E3, therefore, many did not have new games to show or relevant information to share related to those already known but not yet released.
Again according to the ESA president, another factor that has influenced the choice of many not to participate is the period of economic crisis that various companies in the sector are going through, which has reduced the budget for major marketing events such as E3. These same companies then, concludes Pierre-Louis, have been experimenting with new ways of communicating with the public and the press for several years now, using pre-recorded streaming events.
In addition to those mentioned by Pierre-Louis, there were also other reasons which prompted many companies not to renew their willingness to participate in this year’s edition of the fair, and the main one is the drop in confidence of the industry against ESA itself, accused of dedicating too much time to the organization of E3 (from which it derives 50% of its annual budget) and too little to what it should instead do as a trade association of video game publishers in the United States, namely dealing with regulatory bodies and politicians to obtain concessions that make the sector grow at an industrial level.
The difficulties of the fair, or at least of how the fair has been organized and conceived in recent years, ideally start from when Nintendo in 2011 conceived the first Nintendo Direct, a recorded event then streamed on YouTube that paved the way for other similar events subsequently organized by Electronic Arts, Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft and many others, who took the opportunity to communicate their products exclusively. By staging standalone events, companies have been able to avoid having to compete for press and public attention at a busy presentation event, such as E3, where announcements from the biggest brands are common .
One of the marketing traditions of the last editions of E3 is to paint three huge walls of the Figueroa Hotel, located in a passage area near the Convention Center, to represent one of the video games present at the fair. In 2012 it was the turn of The Elder Scrolls Online. (Alessandro Zampini/the Post)
Since the emergence of streaming platforms or platforms based on the generation of content by users such as Twitch or YouTube, companies have then directed many of the advertising investments towards content creators rather than towards the sector press (which remains mostly thanks to the advertisements of the same companies that create video games), profoundly changing the way in which video games are presented and in fact the time frame in which they are updated and supported, and therefore played by people. Since the mid-1990s, the system was based on large collective events such as E3, Gamescom (held in Cologne in August) and the Tokyo Game Show (September), where games were announced for the first time, knowing which would not actually be published until years later. In these years the press could usually try them two or three times before release, fueling a waiting system which from an industrial and communicative point of view aimed at maximizing interest before the video game itself was put on sale.
In the last decade, however, the dynamic has changed, and more and more often the main attention is directed to the post-publication phase, and not to the previous one. Industry, content creators, the press and the public mutually feed a system that today tends to favor games capable of lasting over the long term, continually enriched by expansions or updates (free or paid), as well as video commentary and gameplay content (that is, when a content creators broadcast their matches live). The shift of interest to the post-launch phase has removed the relevance and centrality of large exhibitions, thus making huge events such as E3 unsustainable from an economic point of view.
Since its first edition, E3 has changed shape several times, going through moments of deep crisis and subsequent revivals in a big way. The fair was conceived in 1995 by the newly formed IDSA (Interactive Digital Software Association, which would later become ESA) together with International Data Group, to help the sector expand and free itself from consumer electronics, to which it was until then associated status. In fact, consumer electronics mean all those electronic products used daily at home or in the office, such as televisions, telephones, computers, radios, digital cameras or video game consoles. At the time, video game manufacturers mostly attended the CES (Consumer Electronics Show, an important consumer electronics trade show that is still held today) in the United States or the ECTS (European Computer Trade Show) in Europe, without having an event specifically dedicated to video games.
After the first two highly successful editions at the Los Angeles Convention Center, E3 moved to Atlanta in 1997 and 1998, and then returned to its original location until 2007, when, due to the high costs that exhibitors had to bear, it moved to a much more intimate and contained format, which however, precisely given its lower ambition, failed to attract the attention of the public, the press and new sponsors. From 2009, E3 expanded again, reaching the size it had for the next ten years, until the last edition with an audience held in 2019.
Although formally E3 is made up of only 3 days of fair organized inside the Convention Center, those in which the press (and in certain editions also a limited share of the public) can usually try the games brought by the publishers, what it built its image and its strength are the events that the publishers present have always organized to maximize media coverage, which are usually held in the week preceding the fair. These events are usually called “conferences” and are large shows organized by the most important companies in the industry, where new games, new consoles or new services are presented. For years, conferences have been used more to create an image linked to the reference platform and describe its great potential rather than to detail the catalog of games actually ready for marketing.
This has fueled what for decades has been called the “console war”, a competition made up of exclusive games (that is, published by a publisher for a single console) and extremely aggressive marketing, which has led to a form of user polarization, driven to choose one platform rather than another based more on personal positions than on objective preferences.
One of the best examples used to describe both what the console war was, and how big the impact of the announcements made at E3 was, is that of the unveiling of the price of the first PlayStation, which took place in 1995. One of the protagonists of the industry of those years was SEGA, which had recently put the Saturn on sale in Japan and which at E3, after a brief presentation, announced that it would cost 399 dollars. The then president of the American division of Sony Steve Race then took the stage in the moment dedicated to him and limited himself to saying “299”, which was how much PlayStation would cost in the United States, leaving the stage without adding anything else. That de facto intervention kicked off one of the largest and most successful marketing campaigns for the launch of a new console, and marked the beginning of SEGA’s decline as a console manufacturer (first the Saturn and then the Dreamcast never succeeded to establish itself as an alternative to PlayStation).
Although the video game industry has rejected the current format of the fair, it has not renounced to use the same time window and all in all the same methods of communication offered by the Summer Game Fest, an event created in 2020 by Geoff Keighley who was able establish itself as an alternative to E3, albeit with much more contained ambitions. Keighley, who already organizes the Game Awards every year, has in fact proposed to developers and publishers a smaller and more sustainable event than E3, in which it was not necessary to fill huge exhibition spaces but simply bring a preview of their games so that a selected portion of the trade press could try them and then talk about them. This year’s Summer Game Fest was attended by several publishers who had previously said no to ESA and E3. Proof of the fact that in this transitory phase, in which many still don’t know which direction to go in terms of communication with the public, an event like this is always of some interest. At the moment, the intention of Stanley Pierre-Louis and ESA is to try to organize the 2024 edition anyway “provided we find the balance that can meet the needs of the industry”.