16 ms·

E3 Is Officially Dead

295 points by eXpl0it3r 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
virogenesis 3y ago
https://archive.is/ECxZR https://archive.is/ECxZR
tivert 3y ago
Non paywalled article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/12/how-the-internet-killed-e3/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/12/how-the-internet-kill...
timdiggerm 3y ago
> A mix of new competitors, partner withdrawals, changing audience habits and pandemic-era disruptions led to E3’s collapse, ending years of attempts to resuscitate the event, which began in 1995. This poorly worded sentence can easily be read to state that the years of attempts to resuscitate E3 began in 1995.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Maybe they were trying to prove they weren't using ChatGPT.
  - HlessClaudesman 3y ago
    ...and phrase your results slightly awkwardly like a time pressured human journalist (churnalist) would.
- havblue 3y ago
  The author is fairly well-versed about video games and I've known him online for a long time from a site called gamecritics. I'll allow that's a poorly worded sentence though.
adamrezich 3y ago
again?
- dylan604 3y ago
  think of it like a horror movie franchise. soon, we'll have spin offs like CES vs E3: The revenge!!!
ethbr1 3y ago
RIP, booth dudes and booth babes. Official end of the 90s era.
- lotsoweiners 3y ago
  What on earth will the buff dude with a blonde flattop do now that he can no longer be Guile at game conventions?
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Wait for Duke Nukem Forever to finally come out? /s
  - Root_Denied 3y ago
    TikTok, apparently.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  People rely deny the role of libido in that industry. You could bring them back and have a totally enticing event. Fortunately Miami exists and the west coast ideology of “inclusion by exclusion” is ignored.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Right from the beginning. https://www.engadget.com/2016-12-29-sex-at-ces-an-uncomfortable-coupling.html https://www.engadget.com/2016-12-29-sex-at-ces-an-uncomforta...
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      that was very insightful! sex industry relies on technology distribution and so didn’t exist as well without the latest tech and the interest from enthusiasts easy to forget that
glanzwulf 3y ago
RIP. An important part of the gaming history is now gone, such a shame.
- RIMR 3y ago
  Eh, all good things eventually come to an end. E3 played an important part of gaming history, but we're not worse off given that it died because gaming culture became extraordinarily mainstream and no longer required these kinds of industry marketing events.
danielvaughn 3y ago
I always enjoyed watching videos of crowd reactions to trailers. It's a bummer we won't get those anymore, but I can see why it's too expensive to host an IRL event. I wonder why they didn't transition to an online-only expo? I'd watch that.
- clintonb 3y ago
  Why would a vendor pay someone else for an online-only expo when they can market directly via ads? Why would a customer pay to participate in an online-only expo when they can see videos for free online?
  - The-Bus 3y ago
    Marketing directly via ads is not free, either. Most industries have trade and consumer shows (from film to boardgames to concrete). There's no reason to expect that gaming is somehow unique and should not have one. It's unlikely it will be like the E3 of decades past (or even have the name), but there's value to getting consumers to see/try a bunch of new games.
- r3d0c 3y ago
  it's called summer games fest
  - underlipton 3y ago
    And the crowd reactions are still there in the form of chat/Twitter. And then there's PAX et al.. It's not the same, but the experience isn't completely erased from existence.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Why would you want to a release about your game at same time with all other games, if you didn't have to. You would instead try to guess a few days in year where there isn't likely other releases and aim for that. In later case you get more publicity for same effort. E3, kinda makes sense for connections and getting boots on grounds and showing stuff in progress in controlled environment. But for online you are better off going alone, unless you are tiny.
gtirloni 3y ago
CES next?
- atemerev 3y ago
  CES still exists? With actual people going there?
  - coldpie 3y ago
    Yeah man. It's the hot place to go when you need to find out what they managed to cram a wifi antenna and touchscreen with an unsecured OS into next. Definitely only sunshine & lollipops on the horizon for that event.
    - freitzkriesler2 3y ago
      Lost, thank you for my early morning chuckle.
  - busterarm 3y ago
    CES will continue to exist for as long as it's booked on back to back weeks with AVN AEE. The show did much better when they were run concurrently though.
DonHopkins 3y ago
>The pandemic further exacerbated E3’s woes, as quarantines forced several game publishers to adopt the online news conference format, to varying degrees of success. Jensen Huang's spectacular spatula collection has driven the barnstorming success of Nvidia's online news conferences. https://twitter.com/NVIDIAGeForce/status/1304088143805607936 https://twitter.com/NVIDIAGeForce/status/1304088143805607936
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Of all the CEO's I've seen present, Jensen has been the best. Charismatic engineer.
underlipton 3y ago
Sad. Never got to go.
jimbob45 3y ago
[flagged]
- seanhunter 3y ago
  No love for lootboxes from me, but I'm struggling to see the connection between that and this story, which is about E3.
  - jimbob45 3y ago
    Smaller or even medium-sized game companies aren't on the same level of magnitude of revenue as AAA companies due to lootboxes (and cosmetics, often housed in lootboxes) breaking the economics of game development. For example, the first in-game cosmetic Blizzard released for WoW made more money than all of StarCraft 2 combined[0]. Companies don't care to show off products or even entertain small to midsize companies anymore when they can push these cosmetics and lootboxes on customers so easily. [0]https://dotesports.com/wow/news/former-blizzard-dev-claims-one-wow-cosmetic-made-more-money-than-all-of-starcraft-2 https://dotesports.com/wow/news/former-blizzard-dev-claims-o...
tjpnz 3y ago
Perhaps their audience of gamers wanted it to be about games? Certainly not influencers, "high profile celebrity activations" and other assorted bullshit.
sylens 3y ago
It's sad, but E3 is really a relic of a bygone era. In the 90s or early 2000s, you almost never saw media from unreleased games. The best you could hope for was a few screenshots in a magazine (and later a website) to tide you over, surrounded by illustrative writing by games journalists. E3 was there to inform retailers of what products were coming, motivate them to dedicate shelf space to sell them, and lastly to provide a concentrated pile of news for the mainstream media to disseminate. This is why for so long the keynotes/showcases were called "press conferences". You can even find some recorded videos from these older E3's where Nintendo and Sony are presenting pie charts and graphs in a fairly monotone cadence. Today, with the ubiquity of Youtube, Twitch, and other ways of seeing game footage and content, E3 just became another marketing event. And it was an expensive one at that. Publishers and platform holders chafed at the fact that they would have to do a live stage show where gaffes and demo disasters could occur, and marketing departments hated the fact that all of their effort could be easily overshadowed by another company's big reveal. You saw Sony tap out even before the pandemic hit, opting for its own separate showcases where they could control the message and dominate the news cycle. That became the model that more and more companies decided to pursue. I will miss it because it was a fun event in the middle of May (and later June) that gave you a nice preview of what cool stuff was coming later in the year. There are also some legendary moments from the live presentations over the year, ranging from Sony getting on stage and only stating the price of the Playstation (which could undercut Sega's Saturn by $100, after Sega had decided to rush it for a surprise launch that day) to J Allard introducing the world to the new paradigm of centralized online gaming in 2005.
- ghaff 3y ago
  The pandemic probably didn't ultimately change a lot of things as much as people thought it would early on. But there are certainly events that were stumbling along, mostly on momentum, that didn't make it to the other side.
  - jeffwask 3y ago
    It impacted E3 a bit more than some of the others because they were attempting to pivot from Vendor facing to public facing and compete against established Cons like Gamescon or PAX and the pandemic blew up any momentum they had. It was the interception of their hail mary to save the show.
Insanity 3y ago
Kinda sad for nostalgic reasons, as I haven't actually been excited about E3 in the past 10 years or so.
endisneigh 3y ago
Makes sense - the gaming industry, like Hollywood, has gone full monetization. A lot of the stuff is generic. Why attend? Many AAA games are basically just rehashes.
- dingnuts 3y ago
  This is a particularly weird take for me this year, when I've been absolutely snowed under with good games to play. There are more high quality gaming hours available to me, just from this year, than I have available to play them. It's hard for me to remember a better year for gaming in the last quarter century, as far as new releases are concerned
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    Yeah, same. There have never been this many good games coming out in a year. There also is more Call of Duty and FIFA garbage than ever, but I haven't found it hard to simply ignore it? I think The Game Awards is a good refutation of this argument. They showed off a ton of upcoming stuff, most of which wasn't just FIFA/CoD AAA shovelware. A good demonstration that you can advertise all the other stuff too. I think the real argument is that E3 was industry captured, had become a mouthpiece for the giants, and it was time for it to go.
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    It would be interesting for you to list titles, because I share the OP's sentiment that this year has been largely uninteresting for gaming. I've had exactly three games which I cared about: Like a Dragon Ishin, LaD Gaiden, and Baldur's Gate 3. Good games all, but not exactly a barn burning year.
    - coldpie 3y ago
      Sure, here's some highlights from this year for me: Street Fighter 6, Sea of Stars, Ghost Song (technically late 2022, but I'm counting it), Super Mario Wonder, Octopath Traveler 2, Void Stranger, Oxenfree 2, Age of Empires 2 (on Xbox).
gertlex 3y ago
I remember circa 2005 that E3 seemed to be on its last legs? Maybe it paused for a couple years. Particularly, in English class, there was some prompt (possibly involving time travel) where my answer was "It would be cool to go to E3 in 2020" or something like that, and the student teacher dude thought it was a cool idea and explained E3 to the class... I haven't paid any attention to E3 since then, though! (I also just never tried to keep up with playing the latest games, either.)
- michaelt 3y ago
  I too thought E3 died decades ago, so I looked it up. Turns out in ~2007 E3 decided they were a industry event for industry people, so they made it invitation-only and cut the attendance from 70,000 to 5,000 https://web.archive.org/web/20060811192744/http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060730-7382.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060811192744/http://arstechnic...
kaon123 3y ago
On the positive side, Gamescom has been on the rise for a while, together with other more local gaming events. It shows how the focus of a live event changed from bringing news, to providing entertainment to hundreds of thousands of cosplayers and fans. With maybe some "news" on the side, which then becomes available on Youtube 5 minutes after.
davexunit 3y ago
The Video Game History Foundation uploaded an archive of E3 2000 show floor footage last week. It's quite the time capsule. The cleverly deceptive MGS2 trailer is in it! Also many things "best left in 2000". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SekM6yD26Qc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SekM6yD26Qc
- xnorswap 3y ago
  E3 2000 had one of the greatest trailers ever made for a game that would never be released: Halo. The e3 2000 trailer was when it was under development as a PC title, prior to the buy out of Bungie by Microsoft, after which (?) it became an xbox exclusive.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    > a game that would never be released Halo was released to Xbox in 2001 and by 2003 both a MacOS and Windows port were released. "Delayed" maybe, but definitely not "never released". I played quite a bit of Halo on PC in high school with my friends, sneaking into a nearby university computer lab and usurping it as a LAN party room. For some reason those Windows machines all had Halo pre-installed on them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo:_Combat_Evolved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo:_Combat_Evolved
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      It was not the same game as the PC version they initially were making though.
    - jacobsimon 3y ago
      Believe it or not - it was actually meant to be an exclusive for Mac before Microsoft acquired it. Here’s Steve Jobs kicking off the demo in 1999: https://youtu.be/6eZ2yvWl9nQ?feature=shared https://youtu.be/6eZ2yvWl9nQ?feature=shared
nsxwolf 3y ago
2005 was the year I noticed it was becoming irrelevant. I had traveled thousands of miles to stand in line to be the first to see new games, and while standing in those lines, friends back home would text me talking about the trailer they just watched on the internet.
- Andrex 3y ago
  All those friends were wishing they could play the game as you were about to, though. It's not like pre release demos were that big (yes magazines came with CDs, but those were rare as far as I remember).
ryandrake 3y ago
Sad news. I fondly, but vaguely, remember road tripping from Pennsylvania to Atlanta in 1997 with a bunch of university buddies and other Doom/Quake addicts we connected with online. Someone in the group knew someone who knew someone and somehow we all found ourselves with "press" badges. If I recall correctly, that gave us access to some shit not available to the general public. I don't know, it was almost 30 years ago. 3DFX and Tomb Raider were everywhere. Fun times in a simpler less-immediately connected world.
- soupfordummies 3y ago
  Ah man, I remember that one specifically! I grew up around there and begged my parents to take me. They were probably gonna do it too but then my little brother was born right around that time. Looking back, I'm not even sure we could've gotten in but that was a DREAM for a kid back then.
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    Yup. At the time there was a local video game program aimed at kids that one year ran a contest where the prize was a trip to that year's E3. It was like the Disneyland of video games.
boogieknite 3y ago
Very stupid, funny video from the last minutes of the last E3 in 2019 where this character Bugs Bunnys around trying to squeeze as much fun as possible out of the place while everyone's breaking down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsH0s2_S_Ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsH0s2_S_Ck
- sdenton4 3y ago
  That's not just any character... It's Tim Rogers, purveyor of fine six-hour game reviews. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw
zogrodea 3y ago
Is gaming big among tech people and software engineers? I did (while 18 and younger) play video games for most days of my life, with it being the main thing I did on holidays and also after school on school days, but I kind of lost interest for the most part after I turned 19 (not looking down on others who play them at all). I remember my university (for tech fields like CS) had a room for LAN parties and also had a Discord (mostly a gaming-related chat platform?) set up by one lecturer for informal chat. I'm not entirely sure what relationship our industry (most here are coders in some capacity?) has with gaming and would like to see others' thoughts.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  Yes, gaming is big among people who work in tech (software engineers, sysadmins, etc). It's uncommon to be working in tech and not be a gamer, in my experience. Not unheard of by any means, but not the majority either.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  I gamed a lot as a kid and much less as an adult, though it took a bit longer for me to put it down than you did. I'd say that video games are what got me into computers; I wanted to be a game developer as a child. I never really took to straight software development though; I'm more of a devops type these days, and I'm frankly a bit glad to have avoided the gaming industry because I'm not particularly happy with what it seems to have largely become. That said, there are still some smaller studios doing impressive, innovative work and it's very cool to see that.
- david2ndaccount 3y ago
  I found my interest in video games died when I started working. Whatever button in my brain video games were pushing is now being pushed by the day job and I get paid for it.
  - lukeasch21 3y ago
    I'm curious, if you don't mind me asking what field of work are you in?
TheCaptain4815 3y ago
I'd love to see E3 in the future be a more community driven event with a focus on A/AA games. People still want to see and attend these events, and there's tons and tons of good games that get released every year that go unnoticed.
Tiktaalik 3y ago
Sad to see. At its peak the dueling press conferences was enormously exciting and made for a week of high energy, "must see tv" type energy where you had to be there online in the moment to really experience it in the best way. The era of "Megaton" announcements is long over at this point. Still there is the potential to be surprised by an announcement, but it'll be in some pre-recorded direct video with less instant response from journalists* or the competition. * I mean sadly hand in hand with the death of E3 game journalism has been dying out for years and years too as print media died and the industry died.
thrillgore 3y ago
It took a few years, but COVID has claimed its biggest victim yet. In the era of livestreams and corporate events, it had nowhere to go. ReedPop and the ESA could have tried numerous times to get consumer engagement up, by maybe offering demos of what was on the showfloor. But that never happened. Hopefully smaller events like Gamescom, Paris Games Week, Siegecon, etc take time to look at where E3 failed, and aim to improve engagement with the consumer base. Of which to me, at least, feels a bit aimless due to the sorry state of games released in Generation 8.
- x3sphere 3y ago
  I think E3 was on its way out regardless. Nintendo dropped out of E3 years before COVID even happened. I attended a few years and it seemed like the bigger publishers such as Activision kept downsizing their presence at the event. COVID accelerated things for sure, but I imagine the end result would be the same.
- chmod775 3y ago
  > Hopefully smaller events like Gamescom, Paris Games Week, Siegecon Are these really smaller? At least two of those had attendance numbers dwarfing E3, and Gamescom usually has around twice the amount of exhibitors. Now from what I know, E3 used to be a more exclusive event limited to the press, making for a bigger news cycle. It was the place to show off your pre-rendered "gameplay" trailer and make announcements. Important? Yes. Probably. Big? Not really.
latentcall 3y ago
Very sad. I remember watching coverage of the events when I was a kid on G4 TV (video game TV channel!) and being so excited to see all the new trailers. I would have friends come over and we would eat pizza and watch it all. Now everything is instant on YouTube or whatever, but that magical excitement is gone. The sense of community is gone too. Seeing the announcement of the Wii and waiting in line at Wal-Mart overnight for the release, cash in pocket. Good times. Hope we find that magical excitement again one day.
theNewMicrosoft 3y ago
Well, at least we still have Tokyo Game Show.
- flakiness 3y ago
  I heard that it was disastrous last year because of the heat in Tokyo. I hope it isn't killed by the climate change :-/ I went there once in my twenties and it was fun although exhausting. So many people, so long lines, but you can play "that" game.
PedroBatista 3y ago
Great in the "golden age" of gaming aka the 90s or early 2000s ( debatable but not much :) ) A lot of great things and also sins were committed, but realistically by the mid-00's the World wasn't the same and the Internet as a medium of news and promotion took over ( for the better and for the worse ) E3 should have ended in ~2010, so.. good riddance. ( in a friendly way )
NanoYohaneTSU 3y ago
Good. VGA should also die ASAP and will eventually. The Audience stays the same, but the Show changed. E3 was a trade show for developers, actual journalists, and the gamurz. Journalists decided to make politics fashionable for the world of gaming and so it did. E3 banned Booth Babes when their core audience was males. E3 tightened up on what was going on behind the doors with the groupies. Technology and games stopped being revolutionary or edge and now it's safe. No more actual gaming icons, we need celebrities and influencers. This is the result of the mainstream industry adapting to SafeGaming only. SafeGaming isn't appealing to enthusiasts, just AAA gamers who continue to get taken for a ride. VGA is going to die when their politics decide to change, leaving their current audience behind. Always happens.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  Wow, I'm a game developer and I hated E3 for almost the exact opposite reason. Booth babes are gross and happy to see them go. Celebrities and influencers can fuck right off. My first E3 opened my eyes to the disparity between the actual talent building the games 60 hours a week for $80k a year and money been thrown around for the publishing execs and marketing teams. The marketing budget wasn't being spent on carefully placed ads or thoughtful and creative campaigns, its blown on massive parties for the leaches and vampires.
- tyree731 3y ago
  This feels like the reason you'd like for E3 to have failed, but doesn't line up with the evidence. E3's attendance peaked in 2005, well before booth babes were banned and groupies were cracked down upon. It's decline started right as video streaming took off on the internet, and accelerated as companies like Activision and Sony began pulling out of the event, making it less and less relevant or useful.
shantnutiwari 3y ago
Do people really go to video game shows? I mean, seriously. I can understand conferences for books/tv shows, as you can discuss the story etc with other people, ask the writers about next books/shows etc. does gaming lend itself to that? I wouldn't think so. But I am an old fart in my 40s so :shrug:
- kodt 3y ago
  The video game industry is larger than the Film, Music, Book, or TV industries. It's hugely popular with passionate fans, I would say yes.
impulser_ 3y ago
No surprise. The big platforms, Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo, have a lot of studios under them now that they all have decided it was better just to do their own yearly show. And now there are quite a bit of similar showcases for indie and PC games that it probably not worth spending the time and money making a big show like E3 was.
CM30 3y ago
At the end of the day, the big thing that killed it was that companies realised they didn't need a massive event in the middle of summer to advertise their games, and could run their own events year around. Stuff like Nintendo Directs, State of Plays and Xbox Game Showcases can be held at fairly short notice, are much cheaper than hiring out part of a hall and have less that can go wrong than a stage presentation would. When the only news sources are magazines and physical media and the internet isn't as big of a deal, something like E3 makes sense. In the modern era of YouTube and Twitch and livestreams? Not so much. Pre Covid the whole networking and meeting other developers and publishers aspect kept it going, but once everyone was locked in and events were cancelled, well it was basically just a more expensive Direct or something. So sadly, it's no surprise it's finally died off.
mushufasa 3y ago
We're in an industry with tons of trade conferences and sponsorships drive a lot of ROI. For us the value of the conference is really a marketplace; a place to meet customers and a place for customers to meet vendors (b2b). I guess big conferences for consumer business make less sense; conferences-as-PR. It's not like Sony sales are going to be meaningful by meeting people directly at the conference.
Cypher 3y ago
go woke go broke.
didntknowya 3y ago
it's hard for new gamers to get into a new game when developers are following the marvel universe concept where everything needs to have a backstory and you need to watch prequels/sequels to fully enjoy things. ultimately they are pandering only to their die-hard fans who will churn with time
papaman 3y ago
[dead]
phendrenad2 3y ago
I think app stores killed E3. There's no need to build hype around your game, just pay Nintendo or Sony to feature it on the home screen - people will buy it.

295 points by eXpl0it3r 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

virogenesis 3y ago

https://archive.is/ECxZR https://archive.is/ECxZR

tivert 3y ago

Non paywalled article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/12/how-the-internet-killed-e3/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/12/how-the-internet-kill...

timdiggerm 3y ago

> A mix of new competitors, partner withdrawals, changing audience habits and pandemic-era disruptions led to E3’s collapse, ending years of attempts to resuscitate the event, which began in 1995. This poorly worded sentence can easily be read to state that the years of attempts to resuscitate E3 began in 1995.

DonHopkins 3y ago
Maybe they were trying to prove they weren't using ChatGPT.
- HlessClaudesman 3y ago
  ...and phrase your results slightly awkwardly like a time pressured human journalist (churnalist) would.
havblue 3y ago
The author is fairly well-versed about video games and I've known him online for a long time from a site called gamecritics. I'll allow that's a poorly worded sentence though.

adamrezich 3y ago

again?

dylan604 3y ago
think of it like a horror movie franchise. soon, we'll have spin offs like CES vs E3: The revenge!!!

ethbr1 3y ago

RIP, booth dudes and booth babes. Official end of the 90s era.

lotsoweiners 3y ago
What on earth will the buff dude with a blonde flattop do now that he can no longer be Guile at game conventions?
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Wait for Duke Nukem Forever to finally come out? /s
- Root_Denied 3y ago
  TikTok, apparently.
yieldcrv 3y ago
People rely deny the role of libido in that industry. You could bring them back and have a totally enticing event. Fortunately Miami exists and the west coast ideology of “inclusion by exclusion” is ignored.
- esafak 3y ago
  Right from the beginning. https://www.engadget.com/2016-12-29-sex-at-ces-an-uncomfortable-coupling.html https://www.engadget.com/2016-12-29-sex-at-ces-an-uncomforta...
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    that was very insightful! sex industry relies on technology distribution and so didn’t exist as well without the latest tech and the interest from enthusiasts easy to forget that

glanzwulf 3y ago

RIP. An important part of the gaming history is now gone, such a shame.

RIMR 3y ago
Eh, all good things eventually come to an end. E3 played an important part of gaming history, but we're not worse off given that it died because gaming culture became extraordinarily mainstream and no longer required these kinds of industry marketing events.

danielvaughn 3y ago

I always enjoyed watching videos of crowd reactions to trailers. It's a bummer we won't get those anymore, but I can see why it's too expensive to host an IRL event. I wonder why they didn't transition to an online-only expo? I'd watch that.

clintonb 3y ago
Why would a vendor pay someone else for an online-only expo when they can market directly via ads? Why would a customer pay to participate in an online-only expo when they can see videos for free online?
- The-Bus 3y ago
  Marketing directly via ads is not free, either. Most industries have trade and consumer shows (from film to boardgames to concrete). There's no reason to expect that gaming is somehow unique and should not have one. It's unlikely it will be like the E3 of decades past (or even have the name), but there's value to getting consumers to see/try a bunch of new games.
r3d0c 3y ago
it's called summer games fest
- underlipton 3y ago
  And the crowd reactions are still there in the form of chat/Twitter. And then there's PAX et al.. It's not the same, but the experience isn't completely erased from existence.
Ekaros 3y ago
Why would you want to a release about your game at same time with all other games, if you didn't have to. You would instead try to guess a few days in year where there isn't likely other releases and aim for that. In later case you get more publicity for same effort. E3, kinda makes sense for connections and getting boots on grounds and showing stuff in progress in controlled environment. But for online you are better off going alone, unless you are tiny.

gtirloni 3y ago

CES next?

atemerev 3y ago
CES still exists? With actual people going there?
- coldpie 3y ago
  Yeah man. It's the hot place to go when you need to find out what they managed to cram a wifi antenna and touchscreen with an unsecured OS into next. Definitely only sunshine & lollipops on the horizon for that event.
  - freitzkriesler2 3y ago
    Lost, thank you for my early morning chuckle.
- busterarm 3y ago
  CES will continue to exist for as long as it's booked on back to back weeks with AVN AEE. The show did much better when they were run concurrently though.

DonHopkins 3y ago

>The pandemic further exacerbated E3’s woes, as quarantines forced several game publishers to adopt the online news conference format, to varying degrees of success. Jensen Huang's spectacular spatula collection has driven the barnstorming success of Nvidia's online news conferences. https://twitter.com/NVIDIAGeForce/status/1304088143805607936 https://twitter.com/NVIDIAGeForce/status/1304088143805607936

ethbr1 3y ago
Of all the CEO's I've seen present, Jensen has been the best. Charismatic engineer.

underlipton 3y ago

Sad. Never got to go.

jimbob45 3y ago

[flagged]

seanhunter 3y ago
No love for lootboxes from me, but I'm struggling to see the connection between that and this story, which is about E3.
- jimbob45 3y ago
  Smaller or even medium-sized game companies aren't on the same level of magnitude of revenue as AAA companies due to lootboxes (and cosmetics, often housed in lootboxes) breaking the economics of game development. For example, the first in-game cosmetic Blizzard released for WoW made more money than all of StarCraft 2 combined[0]. Companies don't care to show off products or even entertain small to midsize companies anymore when they can push these cosmetics and lootboxes on customers so easily. [0]https://dotesports.com/wow/news/former-blizzard-dev-claims-one-wow-cosmetic-made-more-money-than-all-of-starcraft-2 https://dotesports.com/wow/news/former-blizzard-dev-claims-o...

tjpnz 3y ago

Perhaps their audience of gamers wanted it to be about games? Certainly not influencers, "high profile celebrity activations" and other assorted bullshit.

sylens 3y ago

It's sad, but E3 is really a relic of a bygone era. In the 90s or early 2000s, you almost never saw media from unreleased games. The best you could hope for was a few screenshots in a magazine (and later a website) to tide you over, surrounded by illustrative writing by games journalists. E3 was there to inform retailers of what products were coming, motivate them to dedicate shelf space to sell them, and lastly to provide a concentrated pile of news for the mainstream media to disseminate. This is why for so long the keynotes/showcases were called "press conferences". You can even find some recorded videos from these older E3's where Nintendo and Sony are presenting pie charts and graphs in a fairly monotone cadence. Today, with the ubiquity of Youtube, Twitch, and other ways of seeing game footage and content, E3 just became another marketing event. And it was an expensive one at that. Publishers and platform holders chafed at the fact that they would have to do a live stage show where gaffes and demo disasters could occur, and marketing departments hated the fact that all of their effort could be easily overshadowed by another company's big reveal. You saw Sony tap out even before the pandemic hit, opting for its own separate showcases where they could control the message and dominate the news cycle. That became the model that more and more companies decided to pursue. I will miss it because it was a fun event in the middle of May (and later June) that gave you a nice preview of what cool stuff was coming later in the year. There are also some legendary moments from the live presentations over the year, ranging from Sony getting on stage and only stating the price of the Playstation (which could undercut Sega's Saturn by $100, after Sega had decided to rush it for a surprise launch that day) to J Allard introducing the world to the new paradigm of centralized online gaming in 2005.

ghaff 3y ago
The pandemic probably didn't ultimately change a lot of things as much as people thought it would early on. But there are certainly events that were stumbling along, mostly on momentum, that didn't make it to the other side.
- jeffwask 3y ago
  It impacted E3 a bit more than some of the others because they were attempting to pivot from Vendor facing to public facing and compete against established Cons like Gamescon or PAX and the pandemic blew up any momentum they had. It was the interception of their hail mary to save the show.

Insanity 3y ago

Kinda sad for nostalgic reasons, as I haven't actually been excited about E3 in the past 10 years or so.

endisneigh 3y ago

Makes sense - the gaming industry, like Hollywood, has gone full monetization. A lot of the stuff is generic. Why attend? Many AAA games are basically just rehashes.

dingnuts 3y ago
This is a particularly weird take for me this year, when I've been absolutely snowed under with good games to play. There are more high quality gaming hours available to me, just from this year, than I have available to play them. It's hard for me to remember a better year for gaming in the last quarter century, as far as new releases are concerned
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Yeah, same. There have never been this many good games coming out in a year. There also is more Call of Duty and FIFA garbage than ever, but I haven't found it hard to simply ignore it? I think The Game Awards is a good refutation of this argument. They showed off a ton of upcoming stuff, most of which wasn't just FIFA/CoD AAA shovelware. A good demonstration that you can advertise all the other stuff too. I think the real argument is that E3 was industry captured, had become a mouthpiece for the giants, and it was time for it to go.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  It would be interesting for you to list titles, because I share the OP's sentiment that this year has been largely uninteresting for gaming. I've had exactly three games which I cared about: Like a Dragon Ishin, LaD Gaiden, and Baldur's Gate 3. Good games all, but not exactly a barn burning year.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    Sure, here's some highlights from this year for me: Street Fighter 6, Sea of Stars, Ghost Song (technically late 2022, but I'm counting it), Super Mario Wonder, Octopath Traveler 2, Void Stranger, Oxenfree 2, Age of Empires 2 (on Xbox).

gertlex 3y ago

I remember circa 2005 that E3 seemed to be on its last legs? Maybe it paused for a couple years. Particularly, in English class, there was some prompt (possibly involving time travel) where my answer was "It would be cool to go to E3 in 2020" or something like that, and the student teacher dude thought it was a cool idea and explained E3 to the class... I haven't paid any attention to E3 since then, though! (I also just never tried to keep up with playing the latest games, either.)

michaelt 3y ago
I too thought E3 died decades ago, so I looked it up. Turns out in ~2007 E3 decided they were a industry event for industry people, so they made it invitation-only and cut the attendance from 70,000 to 5,000 https://web.archive.org/web/20060811192744/http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060730-7382.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060811192744/http://arstechnic...

kaon123 3y ago

On the positive side, Gamescom has been on the rise for a while, together with other more local gaming events. It shows how the focus of a live event changed from bringing news, to providing entertainment to hundreds of thousands of cosplayers and fans. With maybe some "news" on the side, which then becomes available on Youtube 5 minutes after.

davexunit 3y ago

The Video Game History Foundation uploaded an archive of E3 2000 show floor footage last week. It's quite the time capsule. The cleverly deceptive MGS2 trailer is in it! Also many things "best left in 2000". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SekM6yD26Qc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SekM6yD26Qc

xnorswap 3y ago
E3 2000 had one of the greatest trailers ever made for a game that would never be released: Halo. The e3 2000 trailer was when it was under development as a PC title, prior to the buy out of Bungie by Microsoft, after which (?) it became an xbox exclusive.
- reaperman 3y ago
  > a game that would never be released Halo was released to Xbox in 2001 and by 2003 both a MacOS and Windows port were released. "Delayed" maybe, but definitely not "never released". I played quite a bit of Halo on PC in high school with my friends, sneaking into a nearby university computer lab and usurping it as a LAN party room. For some reason those Windows machines all had Halo pre-installed on them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo:_Combat_Evolved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo:_Combat_Evolved
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    It was not the same game as the PC version they initially were making though.
  - jacobsimon 3y ago
    Believe it or not - it was actually meant to be an exclusive for Mac before Microsoft acquired it. Here’s Steve Jobs kicking off the demo in 1999: https://youtu.be/6eZ2yvWl9nQ?feature=shared https://youtu.be/6eZ2yvWl9nQ?feature=shared

nsxwolf 3y ago

2005 was the year I noticed it was becoming irrelevant. I had traveled thousands of miles to stand in line to be the first to see new games, and while standing in those lines, friends back home would text me talking about the trailer they just watched on the internet.

Andrex 3y ago
All those friends were wishing they could play the game as you were about to, though. It's not like pre release demos were that big (yes magazines came with CDs, but those were rare as far as I remember).

ryandrake 3y ago

Sad news. I fondly, but vaguely, remember road tripping from Pennsylvania to Atlanta in 1997 with a bunch of university buddies and other Doom/Quake addicts we connected with online. Someone in the group knew someone who knew someone and somehow we all found ourselves with "press" badges. If I recall correctly, that gave us access to some shit not available to the general public. I don't know, it was almost 30 years ago. 3DFX and Tomb Raider were everywhere. Fun times in a simpler less-immediately connected world.

soupfordummies 3y ago
Ah man, I remember that one specifically! I grew up around there and begged my parents to take me. They were probably gonna do it too but then my little brother was born right around that time. Looking back, I'm not even sure we could've gotten in but that was a DREAM for a kid back then.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  Yup. At the time there was a local video game program aimed at kids that one year ran a contest where the prize was a trip to that year's E3. It was like the Disneyland of video games.

boogieknite 3y ago

Very stupid, funny video from the last minutes of the last E3 in 2019 where this character Bugs Bunnys around trying to squeeze as much fun as possible out of the place while everyone's breaking down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsH0s2_S_Ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsH0s2_S_Ck

sdenton4 3y ago
That's not just any character... It's Tim Rogers, purveyor of fine six-hour game reviews. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw

zogrodea 3y ago

Is gaming big among tech people and software engineers? I did (while 18 and younger) play video games for most days of my life, with it being the main thing I did on holidays and also after school on school days, but I kind of lost interest for the most part after I turned 19 (not looking down on others who play them at all). I remember my university (for tech fields like CS) had a room for LAN parties and also had a Discord (mostly a gaming-related chat platform?) set up by one lecturer for informal chat. I'm not entirely sure what relationship our industry (most here are coders in some capacity?) has with gaming and would like to see others' thoughts.

bigstrat2003 3y ago
Yes, gaming is big among people who work in tech (software engineers, sysadmins, etc). It's uncommon to be working in tech and not be a gamer, in my experience. Not unheard of by any means, but not the majority either.
hotpotamus 3y ago
I gamed a lot as a kid and much less as an adult, though it took a bit longer for me to put it down than you did. I'd say that video games are what got me into computers; I wanted to be a game developer as a child. I never really took to straight software development though; I'm more of a devops type these days, and I'm frankly a bit glad to have avoided the gaming industry because I'm not particularly happy with what it seems to have largely become. That said, there are still some smaller studios doing impressive, innovative work and it's very cool to see that.
david2ndaccount 3y ago
I found my interest in video games died when I started working. Whatever button in my brain video games were pushing is now being pushed by the day job and I get paid for it.
- lukeasch21 3y ago
  I'm curious, if you don't mind me asking what field of work are you in?

TheCaptain4815 3y ago

I'd love to see E3 in the future be a more community driven event with a focus on A/AA games. People still want to see and attend these events, and there's tons and tons of good games that get released every year that go unnoticed.

Tiktaalik 3y ago

Sad to see. At its peak the dueling press conferences was enormously exciting and made for a week of high energy, "must see tv" type energy where you had to be there online in the moment to really experience it in the best way. The era of "Megaton" announcements is long over at this point. Still there is the potential to be surprised by an announcement, but it'll be in some pre-recorded direct video with less instant response from journalists* or the competition. * I mean sadly hand in hand with the death of E3 game journalism has been dying out for years and years too as print media died and the industry died.

thrillgore 3y ago

It took a few years, but COVID has claimed its biggest victim yet. In the era of livestreams and corporate events, it had nowhere to go. ReedPop and the ESA could have tried numerous times to get consumer engagement up, by maybe offering demos of what was on the showfloor. But that never happened. Hopefully smaller events like Gamescom, Paris Games Week, Siegecon, etc take time to look at where E3 failed, and aim to improve engagement with the consumer base. Of which to me, at least, feels a bit aimless due to the sorry state of games released in Generation 8.

x3sphere 3y ago
I think E3 was on its way out regardless. Nintendo dropped out of E3 years before COVID even happened. I attended a few years and it seemed like the bigger publishers such as Activision kept downsizing their presence at the event. COVID accelerated things for sure, but I imagine the end result would be the same.
chmod775 3y ago
> Hopefully smaller events like Gamescom, Paris Games Week, Siegecon Are these really smaller? At least two of those had attendance numbers dwarfing E3, and Gamescom usually has around twice the amount of exhibitors. Now from what I know, E3 used to be a more exclusive event limited to the press, making for a bigger news cycle. It was the place to show off your pre-rendered "gameplay" trailer and make announcements. Important? Yes. Probably. Big? Not really.

latentcall 3y ago

Very sad. I remember watching coverage of the events when I was a kid on G4 TV (video game TV channel!) and being so excited to see all the new trailers. I would have friends come over and we would eat pizza and watch it all. Now everything is instant on YouTube or whatever, but that magical excitement is gone. The sense of community is gone too. Seeing the announcement of the Wii and waiting in line at Wal-Mart overnight for the release, cash in pocket. Good times. Hope we find that magical excitement again one day.

theNewMicrosoft 3y ago

Well, at least we still have Tokyo Game Show.

flakiness 3y ago
I heard that it was disastrous last year because of the heat in Tokyo. I hope it isn't killed by the climate change :-/ I went there once in my twenties and it was fun although exhausting. So many people, so long lines, but you can play "that" game.

PedroBatista 3y ago

Great in the "golden age" of gaming aka the 90s or early 2000s ( debatable but not much :) ) A lot of great things and also sins were committed, but realistically by the mid-00's the World wasn't the same and the Internet as a medium of news and promotion took over ( for the better and for the worse ) E3 should have ended in ~2010, so.. good riddance. ( in a friendly way )

NanoYohaneTSU 3y ago

Good. VGA should also die ASAP and will eventually. The Audience stays the same, but the Show changed. E3 was a trade show for developers, actual journalists, and the gamurz. Journalists decided to make politics fashionable for the world of gaming and so it did. E3 banned Booth Babes when their core audience was males. E3 tightened up on what was going on behind the doors with the groupies. Technology and games stopped being revolutionary or edge and now it's safe. No more actual gaming icons, we need celebrities and influencers. This is the result of the mainstream industry adapting to SafeGaming only. SafeGaming isn't appealing to enthusiasts, just AAA gamers who continue to get taken for a ride. VGA is going to die when their politics decide to change, leaving their current audience behind. Always happens.

jay_kyburz 3y ago
Wow, I'm a game developer and I hated E3 for almost the exact opposite reason. Booth babes are gross and happy to see them go. Celebrities and influencers can fuck right off. My first E3 opened my eyes to the disparity between the actual talent building the games 60 hours a week for $80k a year and money been thrown around for the publishing execs and marketing teams. The marketing budget wasn't being spent on carefully placed ads or thoughtful and creative campaigns, its blown on massive parties for the leaches and vampires.
tyree731 3y ago
This feels like the reason you'd like for E3 to have failed, but doesn't line up with the evidence. E3's attendance peaked in 2005, well before booth babes were banned and groupies were cracked down upon. It's decline started right as video streaming took off on the internet, and accelerated as companies like Activision and Sony began pulling out of the event, making it less and less relevant or useful.

shantnutiwari 3y ago

Do people really go to video game shows? I mean, seriously. I can understand conferences for books/tv shows, as you can discuss the story etc with other people, ask the writers about next books/shows etc. does gaming lend itself to that? I wouldn't think so. But I am an old fart in my 40s so :shrug:

kodt 3y ago
The video game industry is larger than the Film, Music, Book, or TV industries. It's hugely popular with passionate fans, I would say yes.

impulser_ 3y ago

No surprise. The big platforms, Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo, have a lot of studios under them now that they all have decided it was better just to do their own yearly show. And now there are quite a bit of similar showcases for indie and PC games that it probably not worth spending the time and money making a big show like E3 was.

CM30 3y ago

At the end of the day, the big thing that killed it was that companies realised they didn't need a massive event in the middle of summer to advertise their games, and could run their own events year around. Stuff like Nintendo Directs, State of Plays and Xbox Game Showcases can be held at fairly short notice, are much cheaper than hiring out part of a hall and have less that can go wrong than a stage presentation would. When the only news sources are magazines and physical media and the internet isn't as big of a deal, something like E3 makes sense. In the modern era of YouTube and Twitch and livestreams? Not so much. Pre Covid the whole networking and meeting other developers and publishers aspect kept it going, but once everyone was locked in and events were cancelled, well it was basically just a more expensive Direct or something. So sadly, it's no surprise it's finally died off.

mushufasa 3y ago

We're in an industry with tons of trade conferences and sponsorships drive a lot of ROI. For us the value of the conference is really a marketplace; a place to meet customers and a place for customers to meet vendors (b2b). I guess big conferences for consumer business make less sense; conferences-as-PR. It's not like Sony sales are going to be meaningful by meeting people directly at the conference.

Cypher 3y ago

go woke go broke.

didntknowya 3y ago

it's hard for new gamers to get into a new game when developers are following the marvel universe concept where everything needs to have a backstory and you need to watch prequels/sequels to fully enjoy things. ultimately they are pandering only to their die-hard fans who will churn with time

papaman 3y ago

[dead]

phendrenad2 3y ago

I think app stores killed E3. There's no need to build hype around your game, just pay Nintendo or Sony to feature it on the home screen - people will buy it.