E3 is dead. Now what?

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After more than two decades as the industry's most prominent trade show, E3 is dead.

Its demise is unsurprising (even expected, depending on who you talk to) but this still marks a significant moment, and one that saddens much of the games industry and the media.

"It's been a fairly long and drawn out end for E3, with the COVID years adding to that, and as such it [is] sad yet good to finally conclude that chapter in our industry's history," says Morten Larssen, CCO at Raw Fury, who attended every E3 from its inaugural show in 1995.

"The magic of E3 was fantastically well represented in the mid-'90s to the mid-2000s for me, where it was by far the definitive show to go to and really see what was coming from everyone in the year ahead. While we had our own 'E3 for cheap' with ECTS in Europe for a few years, going to Los Angeles every June for the big spectacle of E3 was the highlight of the year.

"In the years after the really sad misstep of the Barker Hangar version of E3 in '07 [where the show was held in an aircraft hangar rather than LACC], it never really found its 'mojo' back, in my opinion, and in the last few years before the COVID pause, it became less and less relevant as a must-attend show – both from a business perspective as well as from my 'inner geek' perspective."

Curve Games chairman Stuart Dinsey has also attended every E3, originally as a journalist and later as a publisher, and agrees that it "felt inevitable that E3 would finally bite the dust."

"In recent years E3 had become about meetings in hotels, not the convention centre," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "The market had changed. The channel – as we once called retail