Everything Everywhere Once A Week (3/31/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. I expected that I’d do an “E3 Edition” of this newsletter eventually — presumably around, you know, E3 — but it seems we’re getting into it far earlier than usual. If you’re looking for Tears of the Kingdom thoughts, we talked about it in the latest podcast, though I suspect this newsletter will be eventually affected by TOTK either as content or as a reason I forget to do the newsletter one week. For now, let’s dive into the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2023.

E3 is Dead, Long Live E3

IGN reported and then subsequently confirmed this week that E3 2023, which had been taking registrations for passes and booths since late last year, would not be happening this June as originally planned. This is not the first time that E3 has been canceled — 2020 and 2022 were both canceled for COVID-related reasons (though I suspect that was a bit of an exaggeration in 2022) and was only a brand across different streams and panels online in 2021. In other words, E3 has not been a thing since 2019, a year in which I distinctly remember walking out of the Los Angeles Convention Center thinking “Damn, this show does not have long left.”

This year, with PAX-runners ReedPop taking the reins, the show has seemingly been canceled for a lack of publisher interest. The show survived Sony pulling out entirely, then Microsoft, but it was unlikely to survive Nintendo, Ubisoft, and other major publishers passing on operating booths on the show floor this year. Eventually there comes a point where the lure of game demos with absurdly long lines cannot entice people to fly to LA for anything beyond the name “E3,” as storied as that name may be. And when you hit that point, you might as well throw in the towel.

It’s kind of tough to lay this on the feet of publishers alone, as I’m told from both ESA and ReedPop sources that both organizations are blaming each other for the cancelation of this year’s event. The show has become somewhat of a relic that massively benefited, and then immediately suffered from, the proliferation of high-speed internet across the world. As the world got smaller and more and more people immediately got news from E3, including streams directly from the press conferences into the homes of pretty much anyone who cared to watch them, the ESA put on dinosaur costumes for a meteor watch party.

Which might be an uncharitable interpretation, because there is not much the ESA could have done about said incoming meteor, but they were perfectly content to stand on their tip-toes to meet it face first. The E3 that people knew and loved died in 2015 or 2016 and everything after was the slow realization that no one’s needs were being met by the current process. The ESA wanted more money out of this endeavor and publishers supplying the actual content for tens of millions of dollars (per publisher) out of their own pocket are competing with everyone else for coverage and marketing. The directions the two wanted to go for those goals — make more money and spend less money — were inherently incompatible.

Think of E3 like Twitter, but it only runs for one week a year. They make a schedule along the lines of “Hey Nintendo you can tweet on Tuesday morning” and then just let people scream whatever thought enters their mind in the non-scheduled times. In an effort to maximize the use they get out of this, everyone starts tweeting whenever they can, and it becomes everyone’s job to look at all these tweets and write news stories about them. And eventually someone goes “What if we posted somewhere else?” while at the same time the guy running Twitter is trying to figure out how to make more money out of it and making it harder for the people supplying the content that makes that money to get a time-limited amount of attention.

There’s also the problem where, like, running E3 is not anyone at the ESA’s full time job. Maybe if it were, there would have been someone sounding the alarm bells in 2017, or someone spending all of their work time trying to figure out how to bounce back after 2020’s cancellation like PAX and GDC were both ably doing. But it was a thing that passed around multiple people when they had time to do it and Reed, a company I’m not overall wild about, was dealt a shitty hand trying to put on a show in 2023. Add in that prerecorded livestreams just get a quantifiably better return on investment and the death of E3 was inevitable.

The event was also not all roses and sunshine for press. Despite the narrative that E3 democratizes game impressions — the show famously allowed almost any press that registered into the convention center — it kind of really only mattered to the biggest players. If you were a favored outlet, the kind that PR contacts you to set up demos and interviews, then you were likely to maintain that lead with exclusives that smaller outlets would never get. E3 without being a golden child is no picnic, it’s an ouroboros of lines and reinforcements of existing standards. This is even putting aside that putting all major game news in one big event of the summer kind of sucks for filling news in the rest of the year.

A lot of people have complicated feelings about the death of E3, with some verbally lashing out at those that are positive or neutral on the news. I think that’s understandable to an extent. To many, E3 was something more than it actually was. To people who thrived off gaming news, it was an espresso shot of serotonin of announcements and trailers and impressions and booths. Video game companies eventually decided to take advantage of that and tailor messaging as if it was a generous gift to the consumer with a bottomline for themselves.

Am I saying that someone’s nice memories from home about E3 are invalid? No, of course not. Am I saying that they were absolutely being taken advantage of and further propagated? Yeah.

All that said, I get it. I’ll miss aspects of E3 too. My career has in several ways tracked alongside it and I’ve been at various shows since 2004. There was a magic air to the show in concept that is unlikely to ever be repeated. I never agreed with the people that called it “Gaming Christmas,” but I understand why they thought that from their positions. For many, this medium is more than just a hobby, it’s a way of life, and an industry gathering offered so many opportunities for enrichment of that. Maybe not healthy, but neither is a Big Mac and we eat those.

There’s a hope from some, including Geoff Keighley, that Summer Games Fest will fill the vacuum E3 has left. This suggestion has also generated outrage in people. To them, Summer Games Fest has always been a pale shadow of E3’s biggest bangers. Which, like, yeah. You’re right. Summer Games Fest is never going to replace the highs of E3 because the market doesn’t work like it did when E3 had highs.

Let’s take E3 2015 as an example, a year when Sony revealed Final Fantasy VII Remake, Shenmue III, The Last Guardian, Hitman, and more. That’s several third parties intermixed with first party content. There’s something to be said for having a big stage to debut your game, but if you can’t steal the spotlight, then you’re only really harming yourself in terms of opportunity cost.

Summer Games Fest — hell, also Gamescom Opening Night Live and The Game Awards — share that problem. You’ll get some occasional big titles, like a Death Stranding 2 or an Elden Ring trailer, but why would Square Enix want to share the FFVII Rebirth news cycle with Elden Ring DLC? I’ve heard in the past that platform holders have swooped in and taken reveals set for Keighley’s shows for their own, which is actually the most E3-like thing about the summer. It’s an open market at the moment.

My guess is that, despite this week’s multiple eulogies for the show, E3 is only dead in spirit, not in brand. The corporeal form of the show will shuffle along, transmogrified into something more PAX-like but with E3 logos splashed everywhere. I don’t know if that really makes anyone happy, but that hasn’t stopped anyone yet.