The cancellation of this year’s E3 is the end of an era. But gamers won’t miss it
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Anyone who has been there knows it. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known as E3 has been for 27 years something more than the world’s largest trade show dedicated to video games. For videogame journalists it was the Sanremo of gaming, it was like for a football reporter entering the locker room and meeting the players. There you found colleagues, developers, publishers, the star game designer and the emerging studios, the large consumer electronics chains and the producers of gadgets and T-shirts, in short, all those who in one way or another considered themselves insiders. That is why the news of the cancellation of this year’s E3 was not taken with a cold mind by those who had a free week in the calendar every year in June.
But it certainly wasn’t something unexpected. Indeed, it was the product of a concurrence of guilt that we have known for some time. Such as, for example, the belated decision to admit the public by opening the doors of the Los Angeles Convention Centers to the curious as well. The prices too high for the exhibition stands. And then the pandemic also started to hit the final blow. E3 is not a funeral, but the signal of a market, indeed of an ecosystem that has changed in a very short time. Actors, business models and even players have changed. Twitch and video platforms have pulverized the physical event by making it easy for those who think, design and produce video games to stay in touch with their audience. Started Nintendo in 2011 to stream video game presentations, manager talks, showcase and demos.
As has happened in other sectors such as that of smartphones, producers and publishers have used the internet to communicate to their public of fans by organizing exclusive physical events. A bit like Apple which has never participated in hi-tech fairs. As for the market, in the last decade video game sales have progressively become digitalised, chains such as GameStop have lost their audience, influencers, content creator or YouTubers, if you prefer. Professionals and non-professionals who, playing live, have started to talk about and promote the video game. Gaming has become the most fluid consumer electronics market, confirming itself as an innovative laboratory of new languages, marketing and fashions.
E3 for years, certainly in the beginning, was the place where something new was being born. Today that market has industrialized, has lost imagination and creativity and is perhaps less surprising to tell. Los Angeles was the place to be to understand how the playful medium would influence society. Those who lived through it will be greatly missed. But the players, the new gamers, won’t notice anything. And rightly so.
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