E3 е откажан откако главните издавачи на видео игри се откажаа

E3 2023 has been cancelled. This year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, slated to run from Jun 13th – 16th in Los Angeles, has been killed by the ESA and ReedPop after several major game publishers pulled out of the expo.

Earlier today, we reported on Ubisoft’s decision to pull out of E3 and stream its big summer announcements during Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest which takes place on June 12th.

That may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but the problems facing E3 have only gained momentum over the past few years. When I attended E3 in 2017, both Sony and Microsoft held major press conferences with some big game reveals. Nintendo had a massive floor presence. Bethesda hosted a lavish party where it announced Последици 76.

But this was also the first year that E3 was opened to the public, which fundamentally changed the nature of the expo, making it far more crowded and difficult to navigate, especially in LA. Already, companies like EA were hosting their own E3-adjacent event. EA Play Live was held miles away from the LA Convention Center in Hollywood.

Then, in 2019 a security breach at E3 ended up leaking the personal information of over 2,000 journalists and other attendees. Already, big game companies were starting to edge away from the conference. Sony had already dropped out of E3 by 2019. Microsoft soon followed. Nintendo gave up live events in favor of Nintendo Directs years earlier.

COVID-19 forced E3 to shut down completely, and 2023 was slated to be the show’s big, triumphant return—but reports that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo were all skipping the show led to rumors that it might not take place at all. Whatever E3 once was, the version of the expo that was headed to LA in June was something else entirely.

And now, it’s been cancelled entirely. In a statement to IGN, the ESA issued the following public statement from Kyle Marsden-Kish, Global VP of Gaming, ReedPop:

This was a difficult decision because of all the effort we and our partners put toward making this event happen, but we had to do what’s right for the industry and what’s right for E3. We appreciate and understand that interested companies wouldn’t have playable demos ready and that resourcing challenges made being at E3 this summer an obstacle they couldn’t overcome. For those who did commit to E3 2023, we’re sorry we can’t put on the showcase you deserve and that you’ve come to expect from ReedPop’s event experiences.

The press release adds that ReedPop and ESA will continue to work on “future E3 events” but there’s nothing concrete about 2024 and beyond. Certainly the future of E3 looks very bleak at this point.

This is a bit of a shame. E3 used to be a major event for attendees and watchers from afar both, with huge game reveals and announcements an exciting break from traditionally slow summer months. The Summer Game Fest doesn’t quite fill that void, though with E3 leaving the schedule entirely that could change. Certainly the December Game Awards have become the event of the year for major game announcements.

And we do need something like that to continue. It’s just more fun to sit down and get a bunch of announcements for multiple games from multiple studios all at the same time. I understand why the internet has made it easy for companies to just drop game reveals at any time on their own terms, but it’s rarely as exciting as during a big presentation with a stage and an audience and announcers and an orchestra and all the fanfare.

It’s sad to see E3 go. Perhaps the ESA can rethink the nature of the expo and bring it back in a new and updated form that works better for everyone. Or perhaps what was once the biggest video game expo of the year will simply fade into memory. Time will tell.