It feels like the end for E3, after three years of canceled editions or only in digital version, the largest video game fair in the world will not finally return in 2023.
While 2023 was to mark the return of E3 after more than three years of absence, it will ultimately be the year of its burial. Today ReedPop and the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) have announced the complete and permanent cancellation of E3. The video game fair will ultimately not be reborn from its ashes this year and seems set for pure and simple disappearance. This decision soberly announced by a tweet on the profile of the event was not justified by the organizers but one can have a flea in the ear on the reasons for this disappearance.
The reasons for the fall of the largest video game event in the world are multiple, but also closely linked to the coronavirus pandemic. After three years of cancellation of the physical edition of the famous convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center, the event had to come back in force in 2023, in order to prove to the world its relevance at a time when video game publishers increasingly ostracized from each other. Because in addition to the health crisis, it is also an identity crisis that will have got the better of the show at the three Es, since its prolonged absence has caused the flowering of events specific to each publisher since 2019. Easier to organize, less expensive, more unique, these shows organized by development studios or the biggest publishers in the field have multiplied since 2019 and have unfortunately proven the obsolescence of a show of titanic proportions like E3.
And the proof, these last weeks have been marked by announcements of the absence of major publishers from the famous E3 2023. Bethesda announced its withdrawal from the event less than a week ago, which also made us doubt the presence of its parent company, the huge Xbox, next June. Rumors swirled about the absence of Sony and Nintendo who have also taken to offering their own Nintendo Direct and State of Play conferences for three years, while EA was known to have teamed up with the direct competitor. of E3, the Summer Game Fest.
Because indeed, the E3 suffered from the rise of the Summer Game Fest since 2021. This festival organized by the influential Geoff Keighley had the advantage of being able to bring together all the personal and digital conferences of the publishers mentioned above, thanks to in a less rigid format than that of a one-week convention, and compatible with the new means of distribution and organization of the studios. Where the Summer Game Fest stamp can be applied to any publisher conference organized during the summer period, E3 remained frozen in a physical and restrictive organization, abandoned very quickly by Sony, Nintendo and other publishers. majors. More than the coronavirus, it is relevance that got the better of the legendary show.
E3 2023 was scheduled between June 13 and 16 at the Los Angeles Convention Center but will ultimately be canceled. As for the future of the event, nothing is less certain. While the conditions were finally in place for a strong return to E3 in 2023, the show finds itself deserted by its biggest exhibitors. A blow for its organizer ReedPop who intends to discuss the future of E3 in the coming months.