What Happened To E3? The Death Of The Once Titanic Annual Gaming Event Explained

The video games industry lost a once-titanic yearly event earlier this week when organizers behind E3 announced the annual conference would never return. This led to sadness from gamers, as E3 was essentially gamer Christmas, as it was always sure to be the source of several major announcements and trailers, not to mention memes, and it fizzled out in the blink of an eye. How did what was once the unquestioned gaming event of the year flame out?

2020: The First Cancellation

It could be said that E3 was a significant casualty of the COVID-19 Pandemic, as it hit the U.S. and shut everything down just months before the conference's planned 2020 edition. This left organizers without the revenue they'd need to help pay for the costs that already had been sunk into planning the event

It also caused major video game publishers like Sony and Microsoft to follow Nintendo's lead and launch their own streaming presentations, as Nintendo had done with Directs the year before. Once the precedent was set for publishers to host presentations rather than enter the "competition" of E3, the conference had an uphill battle to return to relevance.

2022 Cancellation

After a purely digital return in 2021, 2022 seemed to be the year E3 could return to its old in-person state. That wasn't the case, though, it was planned as late as January that year, and the Omicron variant had begun rearing its head, leading to another shut down due to health precautions.

This was when it really started to look like E3 would never return. In addition to major publishers showing little interest in returning to E3 when they could control the narrative of their outputs via direct presentations, Geoff Keighley was pushing forward with Summer Games Fest, another in-person gaming convention that seemed to be rising as essentially an alternative to E3.

Why Was E3 2023 Canceled?

Things looked extremely bad for E3 after a January 2023 report that neither Sony, Nintendo nor Microsoft would opt into a hypothetical 2023 edition of the conference. After paying some lip service to the idea that organizers could still put on a worthwhile event without the gaming industry's Big 3, that dream was never realized, as the 2023 edition was canceled in March.

This essentially spelled doom for the event to many onlookers. The state of gaming advertising and media had clearly moved on in the four years since E3 last happened, and the steady drip of presentations plus Geoff Keighley's Game Awards and Summer Games Fest had more or less made the idea of the once-a-year video game E3 shebang irrelevant (of note, Keighley seemed happy to revel in the downfall of E3).

Earlier this week, the old E3 dog was taken behind the shed, surprising no one, marking the official end of a video game era that was always ripe for entertainment and hype.

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