Farewell to E3 as we knew it, the Super Bowl of our video game fandom
By now, we’ve all read of the effective demise of E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which blacked out a week on serious video game fans’ calendars every June over the past 27 years. I doubt I’m the only one who ever told a friend, sibling, or cousin that I couldn’t make a family function because, well, I had to cover E3, the Super Bowl of the business I’m in.
It was an insider’s event, to be sure; the Entertainment Software Association arrived too late to the idea of admitting the general public, and finally did so only in limited numbers. Then the COVID-19 pandemic finished off what remained. But for as much as has been written about it — and not just by writers like me; I mean by dedicated fans in the forums, on social media, and the pinwheeling chats accompanying the YouTube streams — the news that E3 2023 will not happen, either, really does feel like the World Series has been canceled.
This was not a sudden death; E3 had been lingering in redundancy, if not irrelevance, for the past four or five years. The ESA had struggled to manage its biggest members’ defections going back to 2013, when Nintendo abandoned the pomp and production of a traditional pre-E3 live news conference to devote its efforts to the smaller, recorded Nintendo Direct broadcasts it had begun in 2011 — a format its peers copy today. It’s simply a matter of changing times.
Today, the folks who market and sell video games can make their pitch directly to the customers themselves, rather than via retail gatekeepers or other middlemen, through avenues like Twitch and YouTube. And they can do it for pennies on the dollar compared to buying and setting up the elaborate booths that marked E3’s heyday.
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