Game On: Electronic Entertainment Expo 2022 is canceled – but why?

Electronic Entertainment Expo recently sent emails to would-be vendors that E3 2022 was canceled altogether after being relegated to a digital-only event in an earlier statement. It’s a surprise considering the previous year was hosted online. Since the convention was canceled so unceremoniously, there’s plenty of speculation and very few facts why the Entertainment Software Association decided to pull the plug.

For those unfamiliar, E3 is the biggest event in all of video gaming. It’s a massive expo typically attracting anywhere from 40,000 to 70,000 guests with its rapid-fire, high-profile panels and endless sea of booths featuring some of the biggest game publishers, developers, artists, voice actors and more. Growing up, I was fortunate enough to attend a few unrelated conventions – namely MacWorld and Fanime Expo – so attending E3 some year became a bucket list item.

My passion for E3 faded considerably over time, however, and I doubt I’m alone in this. As the internet grew in size and ubiquity, publishers began uploading their shiny new game trailers to YouTube and social media. For the sake of tradition, they typically wait until their trailer is dropped at E3 or a similar event first, but the gap of time between the live show and an internet upload has shrunk dramatically over a few short years.

Beyond the novelty, is attending even worth it now? There’s considerably less incentive, and it’s only made worse by the biggest publishers avoiding conventions in favor of hosting their own online showcases for years now – Nintendo Direct, EA Play Live and Sony’s State of Play, for example.

So, while the COVID-19 pandemic is the obvious culprit for E3’s biggest struggles, the expo has been on a downward curve for a while now regardless. E3 will likely always be seen as the granddaddy of video game conferences, but formidable competition has cropped up such as Penny Arcade Expo, Game Developers Conference and Electronic Game Show. Some publishers have even been putting on their own shows such as BlizzCon and QuakeCon.

And for better and worse, the hobby has also become popular enough to warrant a pretentious awards show equivalent to the Grammys and Oscars, very cleverly titled the Game Awards. But while I love poking fun at it, in recent years I’ve heard more buzz about the Game Awards than I have about E3 – clearly, they’re doing something right.

E3 is old hat. Its model has barely changed at all since its inception in 1995 – cram tens of thousands of people into the Los Angeles Convention Center, offer hands-on time with some demos and new tech, make a few announcements and call it a day. The only big change so far came in 2017 when 15,000 tickets were offered to the general public – prior to that, attendees had to verify a professional connection to the industry.

While I believe E3 is destined to be overtaken in popularity by the likes of PAX and GDC, gamers owe the annual convention a debt of gratitude. Prior to E3’s inception, the gaming industry didn’t have its own space and settled for attending other trade shows like the Consumer Electronics Show and the European Computer Trade Show to hype upcoming products. But gaming was treated like a sideshow, and CES in particular became notorious for physically relegating video game booths to the farthest reaches of convention centers.

E3 was created at a time when the industry needed all the help it could get creating buzz and proliferating accurate info about upcoming products. The other common method in the 1990s was magazines, many of which strike me as amateurish in hindsight – misinformation was common, rumors were often given unwarranted attention, and most publications picked sides in the console wars, showing clear bias toward Nintendo, Sony or Sega, depending.

E3 gave developers a stage to set the record straight and helped the industry create and maintain a more professional appearance. Even with dozens of similar gatherings cropping up in recent years, there’s something uniquely dignified about E3 and I hope this year off gives the ESA a chance to make the event even more special in 2023.

Riordan Zentler can be reached at riordanzentler@gmail.com.