If there is a place that everyone gamers we have ever wanted to travel to feel like we were in the Mecca of videogames, that place has always been Los Angeles, which between the months of May and June has been home since the late 90s the biggest fair that time has seen, at least in western territory. An E3 in which, year after year, the news of the following months and years on both PC and consoles were presented.
sticks in the wheels
In addition to the fair itself, which really was the least important because it was closed to professionals and the news was already appearing with a dropper, the really important thing took place in the previous days, at conferences held by giants like Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Electronic Arts and even Ubisoft. They were the most anticipated and the ones that dropped the most bombs for the rest of the event.
For this year we were finally going to have an edition normalunderstood as face-to-face, with stands and various pavilions at the Los Angeles Expo Center as well as some conferences, although it was already known that Nintendo, Sony and, almost certainly Microsoft, were not going to repeat the appointment. Many of us already thought that it didn’t make sense for the fair to pretend nothing was happening, but the organizing company decided to continue as planned.
The result is that it has now been confirmed that there will be no E3 in Los Angeles after the trickle of resignations in recent days, where Ubisoft, SEGA and Tencent got off the bandwagon dramatically. They are obviously not to blame for what has happened, but they do seem to have become the straw that broke the camel’s back for the organization. So little attractiveness could remain beyond smaller companies, many of them focused on the distribution of small projects, such as Devolver Digital.
Among all they killed her…
We don’t know if the final straw for that decision was the latest announcement by Ubisoft, which is made of foxes and it seems that its crisis is so deep that we’ll see how it comes out of it, but it looks like E3 2023 is not just canceled but dead forever. Their appointment scheduled for June 13, 14, 15 and 16 will no longer take place and the truth is that looking at the list of remaining participants, it is better that they have taken that path.
The loss of relevance of E3 has been constant for almost a decade, as the companies themselves realized that they could organize presentation events with less money that achieved practically the same media impact as when they did it from a pavilion packed with specialized press in The Angels. And above all, in a cheaper way since it was not necessary to make a millionaire boothfill it with consoles, rent the exhibition space, pay workers and move members of all its offices and development teams throughout the planet.
Although those of us who have attended several E3 throughout its history hurt our souls to see the best video game fair in the world like this, unfortunately there is no other choice but to accept it. The format is out of date and it will be hard to see anyone bring it back to life as it once was. It is better to let it go, forget about this 2023 edition and close this –important– part of the history of video games forever.
Gamers of the world… E3 is dead!