GamesIndustry.biz, which organized E3 2023 before parent company ReedPop was canceled this week, said: editorial (opens in new tab) It explains in detail what happened. According to Christopher Dring, the site’s head of gaming B2B, the short answer is, “The industry didn’t want this E3.”
All but one of the major game companies were initially enthusiastic about attending E3 2023, Dring said.
“Companies were talking about taking up huge spaces,” Dring wrote. “The E3 team was looking at ways to expand the parking lot and use the extra area that had been unused for years.”
ReedPop said in February that the event was “going full steam ahead”. But even though E3 2023 was just a few months away, no deal had been signed, and “the mood has changed,” Dring wrote.
According to him, companies such as Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo cited the following reasons for exiting:
- “Our game is not ready”
- “No code”
- “In this economy, it doesn’t look like you’re luxuriating.”
- “bad timing”
All are classic and evergreen excuses, but excuses about luxury are topical. You could see Microsoft haunting the optics of going all out at E3 the same year that he laid off his 10,000 employees.
There are still big gaming events coming up this June, and Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest is one of them. You can expect major publishers to deliver their own announcements on his live stream. With Ubisoft and Xbox events, 2023 PC Game Show (opens in new tab) As with multiplatform, no date has been announced yet, but it will happen as planned. future game show (opens in new tab) from our publisher.
Dring said ReedPop, which also hosts events like PAX and New York Comic Con, “moved a little slower than everyone wanted” and may have needed a different communication strategy, but the problem is that E3 failed. Said it’s not just what you did change Keely suggested on Twitter (opens in new tab) Right after the news of the cancellation.
“The pitch was good anyway,” Dring wrote. “We separated the business and consumer components (or at least as much as possible at that venue) and it was more affordable. We cleaned up the Wi-Fi, improved the food, and added a stronger digital component. It was…everything everyone wanted, but in the end it turned out they didn’t want it either.
It’s hard to argue against that last statement: E3 2023 would still have happened if the industry’s biggest companies had stayed committed. It is owned by the Entertainment Software Association, whose member companies are just as good as quitting the show. And this isn’t the first time E3 has dealt with exits. The show, which is E3-adjacent but not really, has been around for quite some time this year.
“In hindsight, E3 was probably much more radically different,” Dring wrote. “Without relying on booths to attract people, the physical show is digitally focused, focused squarely on the business side. But some argue that it’s almost a separate event. There may be.”
Dring said he’s disappointed that E3 won’t take place this year. Our own Rich Stanton shares a similar view, praising the virtues of E3 as today’s messy in-person business, press, and marketing event.
Rich believes there’s no going back from this, and seemingly many share the view that E3 is over for good. Dring said he was unsure if he would ever see 3 ‘e rise again, saying this was a show for the industry and the industry needed to bring it back if it was to happen. I repeat.
E3 is back from the dreaded shrinking events of 2007 and 2008, so anything is possible. In the meantime, see you at his 2023 Video Game Announcement Week in June.
