Annual video game convention E3 is dead, for real now

In the end, video games got too big for the big annual video game convention

By Sam Barsanti | December 12, 2023 | 9:44pm

Aux News E3

Annual video game convention E3 is dead, for real now

Blake Anderson playing Nintendo at E3 2019 Photo: John Sciulli/Getty Images for Nintendo

After several years of death throes (exacerbated but not directly cause by the pandemic), annual video game convention E3—a.k.a. the Electronic Entertainment Expo—is officially fully dead now. Out of lives, out of hearts, hit by a ghost, the screen is full of blocks, Sephiroth’s sword is in its chest. You know, dead. The news was announced this morning by the Entertainment Software Association, the organization that ran the event, with a brief Twitter post simply saying that “the time has come to say goodbye” and “thanks for the memories” (plus “GGWP,” which is gamer lingo for “good game, well played”).

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This is a big deal for the video game industry, since—in terms of optics, at least—E3 was the medium’s equivalent of the Oscars and the Super Bowl and a July 4th fireworks show combined. In a world before social media and streamers and websites (the event started in 1995), E3 was the way to hear about the future of video games, and it wasn’t even open to the public for most of the years of its life. That meant that video game fans would have to wait for secondhand reports (sometimes from a magazine, if you can imagine that) to hear about what kind of crazy nonsense Hideo Kojima was coming up with, or what sort of weird design Nintendo had come up with for its latest controller, or whether that year’s Madden or Call Of Duty or Assassin’s Creed would be noticeably different from the one that came out the previous year.

But then the world got social media and streamers and websites, and E3 evolved to become more public-facing, with press conferences that everyone could watch online from the biggest video game publishers, providing fans with hours of exciting reveals and horrible, cringe-worthy attempts at human speech. Nobody could forget Sony’s presentation of a game called Genji: Days Of The Blade in 2006 that was based on real Japanese history and featured recreations of real historical battles… including the appearance of a “giant enemy crab.”

Or how about when Microsoft announced in 2013 that the Xbox One would install your games like a PC so you wouldn’t need to have discs hanging around, seemingly making it impossible to buy used games or even share games with your friends, which prompted Sony to release a mega-snarky video about how to share PlayStation 4 games with your friends?

Official PlayStation Used Game Instructional Video

Or the time Nintendo turned its CEO, the head of Nintendo Of America, and Super Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto into puppets? Actually, that was awesome, but you’d never see that from the movie industry, or the music industry, or any business with a little more sense than video games, at least not at the industry’s single most important event of the year.

As embarrassing as those press conferences often were, their accessibility is what really killed E3. If Microsoft was going to make so utterly baffling decisions and try selling them to the audience in the worst, most unappealing way, why did it need E3 to facilitate it? It’s much easier to just set up a camera and put it on YouTube yourself. And with the pandemic making live events too dangerous for a couple of years anyway, those live-streamed YouTube presentations became the only option.

Now, rather than waiting for one big week every year and having to fight with your competitors for attention, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and whoever else wants to announce a video game can easily do it themselves. And there are big events now with the Game Awards and Summer Games Fest that provide a platform beyond what the biggest companies can afford (plus more specific events like BlizzCon). Not to mention the fact that the average video game streamer says way more embarrassing shit than anyone ever said onstage at E3.

Video game people will miss E3, probably, but the stuff it did well still exists in other places. So there’s not much reason to miss it, but we’ll always have the giant enemy crabs.