The organizers of E3 and Summer Game Fest are gearing up for a head-on clash

polygon.com:

At the end of yesterday’s Summer Game Fest stream, host and impresario Geoff Keighley announced that the show would return in June 2023 as both a digital and, for the first time, in-person event. (There is a small physical component to this year’s Summer Game Fest, but it’s media-only. Oh, and you could also pay to view it in an IMAX theater, if you really wanted to.)

Keighley’s announcement came just days after the Entertainment Software Association confirmed that E3 would return in 2023, both in-person and online, to the Washington Post. ESA president and CEO Stan Pierre-Louis said that, after skipping 2022 entirely, E3 would be back, despite widespread predictions that the stalwart games industry trade show was dead for good after a difficult few years. It now seems the two events are set to clash directly, competing for exclusive reveals, partnerships, eyeballs, and visitors.

This can only mean one thing: The chaos and disarray surrounding the game industry’s traditional June marketing jamboree is set to continue, for one more year at least.

Keighley’s aggressive move against his former partner — he produced the E3 Coliseum live show for a few years but withdrew in early 2020, before that year’s event was canceled — comes at a rough time for E3, the ESA, and the summer games celebration in general.

The pandemic years have, naturally, been tough on E3. When the 2020 show was canceled, Keighley swooped in to stake his claim to a digital version of its celebration of the game industry with the first Summer Game Fest. It worked, up to a point, but many publishers chose to scatter their own showcases throughout a long and exhausting summer of piecemeal reveals.

In 2021, E3 attempted to return with its own digital event,