E3 2023 organizer says the big game companies were 'enthusiastic' at first, but then the 'mood changed'
GamesIndustry.biz, whose parent company ReedPop was organizing E3 2023 before its cancellation this week, has published an editorial(opens in new tab) which details some of what happened. The short if it, according to the site's head of games B2B, Christopher Dring, is that «the industry just didn't want this E3.»
According to Dring, all but one major game company had been enthusiastic about participating in E3 2023 at the start.
«Companies were talking about taking up huge spaces,» Dring wrote. «The E3 team was looking at how we could expand into the car park and use the extra areas that hadn't been used for years.»
ReedPop said as recently as February that the event was «full steam ahead.» But even with E3 2023 just a few months away, contracts hadn't been signed, and the «mood changed,» wrote Dring.
According to him, some of the reasons companies like Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo gave for pulling out were:
All are classic, evergreen excuses, but the one about extravagance has a topical bent—I could see Microsoft fretting over the optics of going all out at E3 the same year it laid off 10,000 employees.
There will still be big gaming events this June. Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest is one, and you can expect major publishers to put on their own announcement livestreams. There'll be Ubisoft and Xbox events, and our 2023 PC Gaming Show(opens in new tab) will happen as planned, with the day and time still to be announced, as will the multiplatform Future Games Show(opens in new tab) from our publisher.
Dring said that ReedPop, which also organizes events such as PAX and New York Comic Con, «moved a bit slower than anyone would have liked» and might've needed a different communication strategy, but that the
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