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Thursday, March 30, 2023

OOPSIE WHOOPSIE, E3 2023 Is Cancelled Entirely!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - This... exact thing happened last year.

Well, if I knew that E3 2023—the Electronic Entertainment Expo of 2023—was gonna be cancelled this week, I wouldn't have written the Ubisoft quits out of E3 2023 article on Monday. But here we are, we couldn't get out of the last Thursday of March without cancelling E3 2023 altogether. Not that ReedPop or the Entertainment Software Association had much of a choice at this point, with no one important wanting to attend. Here is a notice from the official website:

E3 2023 cancelled ReedPop ESA Entertainment Software Association website Electronic Entertainment Expo
On the E3 website, they have a ten-second clip from E3 2019, the last time there was a real, physical-based E3. It was a great spectacle.
(And the last time I decided to try to attend these myself, which was a complete and total disaster!)


There's something very special I want to point out: E3 actually announced directly that E3 2023 is cancelled. This is unlike when they cancelled E3 2022 a year ago, also on the last Thursday of March, where they never put out a direct statement or even updated their website, even after E3 2022 was supposed to have happened. They preferred to make statements to select members of the media, which is a troubling practice in an era of rampant FAKE NEWS by those same members of the media. That means I'm pleased that they've finally done the right thing and told us this. Took their second demise in two years to do so. Remember, it was also cancelled in E3 2020, so the last time an E3 took place was E3 2021, which was an all-virtual event.

So in the past four years, there was one E3 and three cancellations. That's an abysmal track record, and that's why the ESA is finally saying things like they are re-evaluating E3's future. At this point, and this is rough to say as a big defender of E3 long after it's stopped being popular to be one, but perhaps E3's best future is to not have a future. But you know what also shouldn't exist?




Just like last year in 2022, right after the news came out that E3 would be cancelled, industry jackass Geoff Keighley is trying to get people interested in his Summer Game Fest instead. If gaming companies are going out and saying that E3 2023 doesn't fit with their schedule or content plans, then how does Geoff Keighley's season of stupidity at the same June timeframe change that calculus at all? He's obnoxious and I will continue to not give the Summer Game Fest the light of KoopaTV's article pages.

Of course, what Geoff Keighley does is take any event in the surrounding months of June and go and claim it as an event in the Summer Game Fest event circuit, even if it's really not. I'll ignore Geoff Keighley's virus-esque spread attempts and treat a company doing their own event or showcase as that company doing an event. Is that the future of summer game announcements? I don't see how that's better than E3, which is ACTUALLY an integrated, cohesive show of various companies, as opposed to Geoff Keighley putting his name on any random thing going on.

There always was value in E3's existence since the trade show's debut in 1995, which makes E3 a gaming culture institution that has been around longer than it hasn't been in the span of the industry's existence. Not many other things in the industry can claim to have existed for that long. Rest in peace...?

Oh, yeah, ReedPop's involvement accomplished literally nothing. You'd think a group that has a core competency of running events would've had the event actually happen, but guess not! If E3 does ever exist in the future, it's probably better to dump ReedPop.



For a long time, E3 was gatekept by media (videogame journalist) participants as opposed to being streamed over the Internet directly to consumers. Perhaps the ESA still has that mentality when it comes to E3, which is why they tend to resist directly telling people what's going on and instead going through select journalist intermediaries. That mentality does deserve to die and be kept in the past. Do you agree with Ludwig? Or do you think otherwise on that or other topics raised in this article? Respectfully let him know in the comments section.

2 comments :

  1. Ouch! I think this may be the final nail in the coffin, the only way i think they could recover is by hosting a last ever E3. Although companies still might not go to that, and even if they do it wouldn't sit very well with those same companies if E3 tried to do another show the next year. Lying is not so cool.

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