E3 will never be the same | This Week in Business
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Friday 10th June 2022
It's E3 week!
Kind of, sort of, but not really.
It's a week in June when a bunch of game companies are making big announcements about things they will want us to buy in the coming months (and years).
But it's not really E3, because the ESA isn't doing E3 this year. And even if it were, it wouldn't really be the E3 people mean when they talk about E3.
Even when E3 was happening every year, it was changing venues and exhibitors, and filling a changing role for an industry seemingly forever in flux. And given the rise of mobile games and PC games in the past decade-plus, the one more-or-less constant of the show -- a focus on the console space -- simply isn't as crucial to the larger health of the industry, or many of the companies that drive it.
So we can look at this and say it's not really E3, but apart from the use of the actual trademark, what does "really E3" even mean?
The first E3 I attended was 2001. The big press conferences were not held in arenas and streamed live on a multitude of platforms.
Nintendo's big coming out party for the GameCube was held in an uncomfortably warm and low-ceilinged hotel conference room. It wasn't live-blogged, much less live-streamed. Executives like Peter Main and Satoru Iwata read lines not from a well-hidden teleprompter, but from scripts they printed out and carried with them on stage. There was an executive Q&A at the end of the show, and it kicked off not with the press attempting to draw more information out of the execs, but with a request for an autograph.
I miss when E3 briefings had production values on par with a high school talent show
The show itself was sprawling, a multitude of publishers and developers packing every apparent
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