End of an E3ra | This Week in Business
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The Entertainment Software Association made it official this week. The Electronic Entertainment Expo is no more.
QUOTE | "After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last, the time has come to say goodbye. Thanks for the memories." – The ESA confirms the show's demise on social media.
First off, that's a pretty blatant lie. Each E3 was not bigger than the last. In 2007, the show floor moved from the massive Los Angeles Convention Center to an airplane hangar in Santa Monica and cut attendance to less than one-tenth of 2006's show, for Frogger's sake.
The biggest E3 by any reasonable definition was almost certainly E3 2005, with an announced attendance of more than 70,000 and an LACC so packed that the event was taking up meeting rooms in the neighboring Staples Center.
QUOTE | "I think if I had one more inch of space, I would have sold it. I don't think that there's any spot left untouched in the building..." – E3 show director Mary Dolaher, after the 2015 show.
Anyone who attended the shows could tell you E3 2005 and 2006 were on a different level to any of the more recent E3s, the ones where Kentia Hall served not as an overflow show floor for a horde of exhibitors that couldn't land space in the main halls but as a parking lot. The ones where the South and West Hall show floors sadly petered off into nothing well before you reached the back wall, and you started to wonder if they could have fit a few more parking spaces up there as well. The ones with
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