E3 2023 canceled: The end of a special place & time for video game fans

By now, we’ve all read of the effective demise of E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which blacked out a week on serious video game fans’ calendars every June over the past 27 years. I doubt I’m the only one who ever told a friend, sibling, or cousin that I couldn’t make a family function because, well, I had to cover E3, the Super Bowl of the business I’m in.

It was an insider’s event, to be sure; the Entertainment Software Association arrived too late to the idea of admitting the general public, and finally did so only in limited numbers. Finally, it was overthrown by the COVID-19 virus pandemic. But for as much as has been written about it — and not just by writers like me; I mean by dedicated fans in the forums, on social media, and the pinwheeling chats accompanying the YouTube streams — the news that E3 2023 will not happen, either, really does feel like the World Series has been canceled.

E3 was not in a state of sudden doom. For the past 4 or 5 years, E3 has been in redundancy, but not irrelevant. The ESA had struggled to manage its biggest members’ defections going back to 2013, when Nintendo abandoned the pomp and production of a traditional pre-E3 live news conference to devote its efforts to the smaller, recorded Nintendo Direct broadcasts it had begun in 2011 — a format its peers copy today. It’s simply a matter of changing times.

The people who sell and market video games today can reach their customers directly through channels like Twitch or YouTube, and not via intermediaries such as retail gatekeepers and other middlemen. And they can do it for pennies on the dollar compared to buying and setting up the elaborate booths that marked E3’s heyday.

E3 in its prime actually wasn’t a channel to consumers; it was a channel to deal-makers, retail buyers, and those who once spent the most money and moved the most product. Yes, galas that were consumer-oriented and driven by fans drove Los Angeles news. The most significant of these were off-site, and they preceded E3. E3 in fact was a Tuesday-to Thursday expo. It felt as though it started on Saturday.

South Hall was still available for rent by platform and publisher holders. There they could meet with Walmart, GameStop and Best Buy to discuss stocking shelves and other details. That was the real point of E3 — it was a trade show, after all.

But over the past decade, game sales steadily moved online, and to the publishers’ marketplaces themselves — not just the PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store, and Nintendo eShop, but also Ubisoft Connect, EA’s Origin, and, of course, Steam (and Valve rarely had any presence at E3, anyway). The hobnobbery and relationship-building, pairing up-and-coming developers and their projects with publishers? It’s up to industry functions like the Game Developers Conference to broker those partnerships now.

However, E3’s old-fashioned meet-and-greet and personal style was valuable. In sports writing, there’s a long tradition of going to the locker room to face those you have ripped in print. That locker room was E3. It reminded me that real people devote years of their lives to my enjoyment, and to my readers’, too. Depriving myself of this connection makes my criticisms more pettish and my speculation less informed. We do a lot of virtual preview events these days, and while I’m grateful for the chance not only to play a game in development, but to play it in my home, where I’ll actually be playing once it launches, it’s not the same as going into a publisher’s booth — much less playing a series like FIFA with its executive producer, and revealing to him how bad I am at it, actually.

Even though E3 is my last time covering it, I’ll miss it. This was one of the few things I could talk about with friends and family outside this industry. I actually did make friends there — people I’d only known online, or as a byline in a peer publication — and it really was heartwarming to meet them in person. There are many things we can do online, such as Nintendo Directs or PlayStation States of Play developer diaries, but there is nothing like the feeling of being at that expo.

Photo by Michael Tran/FilmMagic/Getty Images

My favorite memory from the Los Angeles Convention Center was in 2011, at EA Sports’ booth. It was the show publisher. NCAA Football 12It would go on sale in the month following. The product was already baked, and was available for pre-view. There was not much to reveal. But I was in there shooting the breeze with developers from EA Tiburon when I was politely pushed out of the way by a very robust gentleman leading Snoop Dogg’s security detail. Snoop came in to play the game and sat down alongside producer Ben Haumiller. Ben was playing Oregon. He smoked it.

It’s the kind of thing that only happened at E3, but it’s also the kind of thing that hadn’t happened in, hell, the last five or six years. And now it’ll never happen again.