E3 is dead, long live E3.
Representatives from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) have announced to reporters from The Washington Post that the organization will discontinue hosting the E3 trade show exhibition. This event, which was once the largest in the industry, and began back in 1995.
Honestly at this point it was an inevitability that the ESA would finally pull the plug on its fledgling E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) after several years of cancelations, digital only events with the expo having long lost its relevance for game announcements and showcases to digitized self-hosted events orchestrated by the likes of all major three console manufacturers.
Aside from the fact that all major console players host regular digital events that highlight upcoming releases and make several announcements, the likes of Geoff Keighley and his barbaric “Game Awards” ceremony is in essence the spiritual successor to what once was the world’s largest exhibition of gaming, with announcements now contained within a fake award show and viewed as a third wheel.
Modern video games simply aren’t made for actual gamers anymore, they’re more or less a genre to peddle progressive ideologies with woke-centric themes and values in the form of movie-like “cinematic” single player experiences alongside repetitive and shallow live service games that push microtransactions down your throat.
These expos are no longer about a celebration of video games for gamers to flock towards, they’ve more or less been radicalized and turned into the products themselves, woke and progressive.
Honestly, E3 lost its edge and popularity as gaming went from a niche subculture to a globalized tyrant where game developers seeking a more wider audience of casuals to extort rather than actually catering to beloved fans and audiences.
I for one blame the loss of booth babes as the main contributing factor, as globalized standards made their way into the event and the whole gaming industry was when actual gamers have been displaced from their hobby, with booth babes being dubbed sexist and derogatory to women.
The writing was on the wall for the E3 expo since 2019, which saw the loss of Sony from making a keynote presentation for the first time in the events entire history, with Nintendo also contributing to the expo albeit in a pre-recorded Nintendo Direct fashion, the final nail in the coffin for E3 was its 2020 cancellation due to the COVID pandemic.
The event was outright canceled, and the following year in 2021 the expo hosted a variety of virtual livestreamed keynotes and conferences from the likes of Microsoft and Nintendo, with the expo once again being canceled throughout 2022 and 2023 before finally being killed off for good.
Geoff Keighley effectively killed off the need for E3 with his Summer Game Fest and Game Award events, which are more or less the only showcases for smaller developers to announce upcoming releases as all major console manufacturers no longer need to pay exorbitant amount of money in logistics to attend physical events to do much of the same when their consumers have gladly shifted over to their own virtual events instead in this digital era.
