End of an E3ra | This Week in Business

16.12.2023 - 15:31 / gamesindustry.biz

This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

The Entertainment Software Association made it official this week. The Electronic Entertainment Expo is no more.

QUOTE | "After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last, the time has come to say goodbye. Thanks for the memories." – The ESA confirms the show's demise on social media.

First off, that's a pretty blatant lie. Each E3 was not bigger than the last. In 2007, the show floor moved from the massive Los Angeles Convention Center to an airplane hangar in Santa Monica and cut attendance to less than one-tenth of 2006's show, for Frogger's sake.

The biggest E3 by any reasonable definition was almost certainly E3 2005, with an announced attendance of more than 70,000 and an LACC so packed that the event was taking up meeting rooms in the neighboring Staples Center.

QUOTE | "I think if I had one more inch of space, I would have sold it. I don't think that there's any spot left untouched in the building..." – E3 show director Mary Dolaher, after the 2015 show.

Anyone who attended the shows could tell you E3 2005 and 2006 were on a different level to any of the more recent E3s, the ones where Kentia Hall served not as an overflow show floor for a horde of exhibitors that couldn't land space in the main halls but as a parking lot. The ones where the South and West Hall show floors sadly petered off into nothing well before you reached the back wall, and you started to wonder if they could have fit a few more parking spaces up there as well. The ones with conspicuous holes in the attendee list, like EA, Sony, and Activision.

E3 was on a downswing for years before the ESA pulled the plug. For more than a decade, depending on who you ask. And even if the trade group's social media channels don't want to admit that, at the very least ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis acknowledged the truth of the matter.

QUOTE | "There were fans who were invited to attend in the later years, but it really was about a marketing and business model for the industry and being able to provide the world with information about new products. Companies now have access to consumers and to business relations through a variety of means, including their own individual showcases." – Pierre-Louis, in an interview with the Washington Post breaking the news of the show's demise.

So we've got a couple causes of death alluded to in that statement.

E3 as a marketing event grew obsolete because companies realized they could just have their own showcase targeting