The replacement for E3 happens in July, it is invitation only, it is being held partly in an airport hangar in Santa Monica, and I genuinely do not know whether to expect a better event or a wake.
The reasoning for the change was sound when it was announced and it has not stopped being sound. Sixty thousand people, competing sound systems, publishers spending sums on booths that could fund a development team, and almost nobody in the building actually buying anything. The costs fell hardest on the companies getting least out of it. Something had to change.
What is arriving instead is a few thousand people, mostly press and business, spread across hotel suites and a couple of venues, with each publisher getting a scheduled window rather than shouting over the neighbours. On paper that is strictly better for everybody involved. Journalists see more in less noise. Publishers spend a fraction. Nobody loses their voice by Wednesday.
The thing I do not think anybody has solved is what the week is for now. E3 worked as a shared moment. Everything got announced in the same seventy-two hours, the whole industry paid attention at once, and a demonstration that landed in that room echoed for a year. Nintendo’s controller reveal worked because of the context as much as the content. Take away the shared venue and you have a series of appointments.
My suspicion is that the platform holders quietly prefer this, and that the smaller publishers will discover they hate it. A company with sufficient gravity can command attention whenever it likes, which is a lesson everybody watched being taught in January when a single keynote took an entire week away from a show with two thousand exhibitors. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo can all do a version of that. A mid-sized studio cannot, and its route to coverage was standing in a hall the press had already travelled to.
What I will be watching for in July is whether anything gets announced that would not have been announced anyway. If the new format produces the same news in a quieter room, it has worked exactly as intended and the industry has saved a lot of money. If it produces less news and less attention, then what was killed was not an expensive trade show but the one week a year this business behaved like a single thing.
I said in July that whatever replaced it would be more efficient and less fun. Three months out, I would revise that only slightly: I think it will be more efficient, less fun, and quietly worse for everybody who is not already large.