E3 2023 and Summer Game Fest set to clash, both in person and online

At the end of yesterday’s Summer Game Fest stream, host and impresario Geoff Keighley announced that the show would return in June 2023 as both a digital and, for the first time, in-person event. (There is a small physical component to this year’s Summer Game Fest, but it’s media-only. You could pay extra to watch it in an IMAX cinema if necessary.

Keighley’s announcement came just days after the Entertainment Software Association confirmed that E3 would return in 2023, both in-person and online, to the Washington Post. Stan Pierre-Louis, ESA’s president and chief executive officer, said E3 will be returning after having canceled 2022 completely. This despite widely held expectations that E3 was going to disappear after several years of difficult times. Both events appear to be competing directly for exclusive reveals and partnerships as well as eyeballs.

This can only mean one thing: The chaos and disarray surrounding the game industry’s traditional June marketing jamboree is set to continue, for one more year at least.

Keighley’s aggressive move against his former partner — he produced the E3 Coliseum live show for a few years but withdrew in early 2020, before that year’s event was canceled — comes at a rough time for E3, the ESA, and the summer games celebration in general.

E3 has been hit hard by the pandemic years. Keighley came in after the 2020 show was cancelled and vowed to create a digital version. This first Summer Game Fest is his attempt to celebrate the industry. Although it worked up to a point and was very successful, many publishers decided to spread their showcases over a lengthy, exhausting summer.

E3 tried to bring back its digital event in 2021. It was poorly designed and had few sponsors. It was clear that the design of the online event betrayed an inept understanding of the internet. This made it easy for publishers and developers to collaborate with Keighley, or host their own shows. ESA was furious and cancelled the show for 2022 due to concerns over coronavirus. reports suggestIt was a cover to hide a more serious lack of enthusiasm for the staging of the event.

In fact, E3’s woes go back further than the pandemic. EA, Sony, and other key exhibitors had been leaving E3 before 2020. The value of an in-person tradeshow was being questioned by stakeholders at big brands, when they can speak directly to fans and the entire industry online.

Since 2017, E3 has also attempted to morph what had always been an industry-only show — albeit with a pretty wide definition of “industry” — into a hybrid trade and public event, with some tickets available for the public to buy. This only resulted in an overcrowded event that didn’t seem well set up to serve either of its audiences.

Even worse, the ESA was exposed to the personal information of thousands of people in its database, many of them journalists or influencers. This led to the ESA being subjected to harassment.

The ESA and E3 as we know it have an awful long way back to climb out of this position — which, it must be said, is more than partly self-inflicted. E3’s brand is not as strong as it used to be, and it is destroying trust and relationships. Keighley is the right person to replace E3.

Photo by Kevork Dransezian/Getty Images

It won’t be easy. In announcing an in-person component for Summer Game Fest, Keighley is acknowledging that if the summer games celebration is to have a future, it can’t exist only online. Without a physical event, there’s insufficient incentive for developers and publishers to stick to a set of dates or partner up for their reveals — they can just go it alone whenever they want. In theory it might be easier for publishers to make themselves heard that way, but in practice, there’s no focus, and audience interest ebbs away, as we found in 2020. There’s absolutely a benefit to the industry in coming together to show their wares, and it’s more exciting for fans, too — so that means coming together in person.

However, staging such large-scale events is not easy. It is amazing hard. (I should know; I used to work at a company which held its own games expo in the U.K. — EGX — and which was eventually acquired by ReedPop, which runs PAX.) Geoff may be better at understanding the internet than ESA. But the ESA has more experience managing a showfloor than Geoff. His only exposure to a physical event was the invitation-only Game Awards.

It is not because the ESA knows how complicated it will be to produce a show, but it chose to cancel it. ESA is taking time to redesign E3 as an industry event. There’s a very good chance that the E3 of the future will look a lot more like a large-scale fan event — a PAX, a BlizzCon, or a D23 Expo — than a trade show. If it’s smart (which, admittedly, is very much up for debate) the ESA will be looking for a partner experienced in such events to help it stage E3 next year. Summer Game Fest is going to be more difficult than any other event due to all of the difficulties facing ESA.

Summer Game Fest Image

Next year’s state of gaming is what we must lastly consider. Yesterday’s opening Summer Game Fest stream was hardly convincing. Presented in a quiet, empty studio with no audience, and boasting a distinctly second-rate roster of reveals, it spoke of a game industry that is still reeling from the pandemic — even as in-person entertainment fields like theater, film, and sports are roaring back to life. Producing schedules remain affected. 2022 saw a sudden influx of big delayed releases in early 2019, followed by an extended dry spell.

“We don’t need E3” has been a common refrain for years now. But perhaps we do need something like it to restore some of the confidence, focus, and showmanship that’s currently missing, and to make being a games fan exciting again. Keighley, as well as the ESA, know this. Most publishers are aware of this truth in their hearts. Even though they may have been able to spend less money. It seems that at least another year will pass with chaos and confusion as well as scattered competition, before the industry settles on its vision.