The ESA announced at the end of this month that E3 as it exists is finished, and after the initial surprise I find it hard to argue that it should not be.
The event had become genuinely strange. Sixty thousand people in a convention centre, competing sound systems turned up until the halls were physically painful, publishers spending sums on booths that would fund a small development team, and an atmosphere that had drifted from trade show towards something closer to a rock festival with worse air conditioning. Almost nobody there was buying anything. The retail buyers who justified the format originally were a small minority of the attendance.
What replaced them was press and enthusiasts, and the economics of that do not work. A publisher spends a fortune to put a playable build in front of journalists who could have seen it in a hotel suite for a fraction of the cost, while competing with the noise of the company next door doing exactly the same thing. The largest exhibitors were paying most of the bill and getting the least out of it, which is the sort of arrangement that survives on tradition until somebody does the arithmetic.
The replacement is meant to be smaller and invitation only, which sounds sensible and will annoy a great many people. The thing E3 did, almost by accident, was function as an annual public moment for the entire industry. One week where everything got announced and everybody paid attention at once. Nintendo’s controller demonstration in May worked precisely because it happened in that context, with the whole industry in one building watching people play. Something in a hotel suite does not generate that.
What I suspect happens next is that the platform holders stop sharing a stage and start running their own events on their own schedule, which is better for them and worse for everybody else. Apple has demonstrated that a single company can command complete attention for two hours if it controls the timing and the room. Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo have all watched that closely. Why split the coverage three ways in one week when you can have a whole news cycle to yourself in a month with nothing else in it?
The losers are the smaller publishers, obviously. A mid-sized studio could take a modest booth at E3 and be seen by the same press covering the enormous ones, because everybody was already in the building. Take away the shared venue and that studio has to persuade journalists to travel somewhere specifically for them, which is a much harder ask and one most of them will lose.
Europe gets more interesting out of this, incidentally. Leipzig has been growing for a few years and the Tokyo Game Show has always run on a different model, closer to a public event than a trade one. If the American show shrinks, some of that attention has to land somewhere.
I will miss it more than I expect to, and I am aware that is nostalgia rather than analysis. The show was expensive, exhausting and increasingly ridiculous. It was also the one week a year when this industry behaved like a single thing rather than three platform holders and their suppliers. Whatever replaces it will be more efficient and less fun, and I do not think anybody has worked out yet what gets lost when there is no longer a room everybody has to be in.