The former standard of gaming expo is gone, as announced today on X via @E3
I have great memories of watching E3 intently, even taking work off so I would not miss the conferences. It was a great event for fans anxiously awaiting the next big game, or when we were lucky, the next console generation announcements. There were opportunities to attend, which used to be a dream of mine, for a chance to be the first to try new titles from our favorite developers.
But then it wasnt.
The age of the internet has continued to evolve and so has the viewer's preferences. Whereas we used to wait for certain websites to stream the event, we could later pick our favorite Media Website to watch along. It continued to branch out to watching our favorite content creators hosting a watch-a-long, to ultimately just waiting until the end and catching the trailers on twitter that you care about rather than watching 3 hours of presentation.
Additionally, the rise of smaller, more consumer focused, expos like PAX fill the regional demand and other developers opted to host their own directs, following the footsteps of Nintendo.
Costs across the board increased and time/space at the expo began to price devlopers out. They could reach a larger audience for less money by taking things into their own hands and managing internally and frankly, did not need E3 and their reach to do so anymore.
I will miss the hype of the big announcement, fan events at movie theaters for Playstation where they gave out goodies, and I will always cherish the memories about trailers that didnt use in-game footage to show a game that ends up not coming out and getting canceled 5 years later. But that was a special place in time for the gamer that we may never get again.
E3 is dead. Long live E3.
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