The whipsaw of online and in-person gaming events | The DeanBeat

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It feels a bit like a whipsaw we’re seeing when it comes to whether people want to go to in-person events or attend online events in gaming. And the same goes for whether they want to do some work in person or work completely remotely.

And I suspect that this answer will be with us for a long time, as to whether we want to do things online or in person: It depends.

We saw this whipsaw happen ourselves during the pandemic when we converted our own GamesBeat Summit events to online-only events in 2020 and started doing more of those events. But we returned to in-person and online hybrid events in April 2022 and October 2022.

By February 2023, we found that most people (and sponsors) didn’t want to go to an online-only event anymore, and so we pushed our metaverse event to our hybrid May event, GamesBeat Summit 2023. Our hybrid May 22-23 event will be in person in Los Angeles, while May 24 will be online. (You can get 40% off the ticket price with this code: GBSDEANNEWS).

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With the cancellation of E3 for this coming June, we saw the same whipsaw. E3 was canceled in 2020, and it had a poorly attended online event in 2021, when Geoff Keighley’s rival Summer Game Fest did very well drawing tens of millions of people to a shortish online announcement show. In 2022, the online-only Summer Game Fest got stronger, and E3 once again had a relatively weak showing as Keighley got most of the big announcements.

This year, the Summer Game Fest