Last week, a story in The Washington Post announced that the Entertainment Software Association has formally ended the Electronic Entertainment Exposition. ESA CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis told Washington Post games correspondant Gene Park, “We know it’s difficult to say goodbye to such a beloved event, but it’s the right thing to do given the new opportunities our industry has to reach fans and partners.”
I had held out hope that the ESA would get their act together, that they could find a way to make E3 happen once more in the wake of the pandemic. Our Reviews Editor, Jess Clayton-Berry, told me the day before the announcement that E3 was dead, to which I responded that it wasn’t over till the ESA “pulls the trigger to put the bullet behind its ear.” Well, the trigger has been pulled. Now we have to deal with the mess.
The Agony and The Ecstasy
E3 officially started in 1995, the same year I graduated high school. By the turn of the Millennium, it had cemented a place in gaming culture as the signature event of the industry for the year. Everybody wanted to get into E3, and more than a few people did despite some questionable methods. A very different time than now. When I started my games journalism career, writing for The Armchair Empire, I was pretty sure I’d never get into E3, mainly because we weren’t that big. At least, I didn’t think we were.
As it turned out, we were just big enough to squeak in as foreign press (AE was based in Canada, I was working remotely in Arizona), so when I made my first trip, it was slightly surreal to me. I made a few trips over the years, even meeting my EIC from Armchair Empire face to face. Three days of non-stop running around, whipping from one side of the Los Angeles Convention Center to the other and back again. The occasional party or off-site event, the Video Games Live concert, lots of waiting around and sweating inside pop-up “meeting rooms” about the size of a small walk-in closet. In some regards, they were the most gruelling days of my life as a writer and journalist. But they were also some of the most memorable.
I can remember the unfiltered wonder of waiting around the Bethesda “museum” for the presentation introducing Skyrim, seeing the props they’d built and marveling at the amount of effort they’d undertaken. I remember watching Shinji Mikami presenting The Evil Within for the first time and thinking, “This guy knows horror, but you wouldn’t think so just by looking at him.” Seeing John Romero walking the booths and just being very chill was a moment. Only reason I didn’t come up to him and talk was because I was standing in line for the XCOM presentation, and I also figured he probably didn’t want to be bothered. CD Projekt RED’s suite on the upper floor was a thing to see: half casual lounge with free beer and Polish developers to chat up, half mini-theater showing off an early version of The Witcher 3.
Yeah, I saw a lot of games that didn’t make it along with the blockbusters that did. I saw the promise of those early versions, which always made it hard when the final release didn’t live up to the goals and aspirations of the developers. But whether it was a big name showing or some small indie looking to make a splash, there was an atmosphere of charged excitement. Possibilities ran wild. As grueling as it was for me as a journalist, it was probably ten times worse for the guys who had to run the booths and talk to the press all day. Though you wouldn’t know it by the smiles on everybody’s faces. We were at E3, the single most important event for an entire industry, and that was quite a thing just by itself.
The End Of The Affair
Behind the scenes, E3 often found itself mired in controversy. The concerns and objections about “booth babes” in the early years of the show never completely went away, though by the time I was going, skinny jeans and tight T-shirts were pretty common among booth staff who weren’t behind a desk. A far cry from the skimpy bikinis of an earlier time. There were the continual pickets by Christian fundamentalists on the other side of the street from the convention center, never loud or anything, but neither did they make any specific point about why they were there. The off-site shenanigans of certain personages in the industry, including the infamous “Cosby Suite,” were damning but hardly destructive to the event as a whole.
It was the COVID-19 pandemic that finally did E3 in for good. Pierre-Louis can blather on all he likes about “how to engage new audiences in different ways,” but the ugly truth is that E3 was losing its mojo even before the plague. A lot of this can be laid at the feet of the big names in the industry: Sony, EA, Microsoft, and Nintendo. In some regards, they were already sort of ahead of the game by having their own showcases disconnected from E3. But with the closure of the event in 2020 due to the ongoing pandemic, they suddenly became the only game in town. Why would they decide to go back? Far more cost effective to do a direct presentation over Twitch or YouTube than load up a bunch of gear, book a block of hotel rooms, ship everything down the road or across the seas for a week, then pack it all up and go home.
It sounds seductively reasonable when you look at it purely from the numbers angle. Looking at it from the perspective of money spent and time used, E3 was always a major expense. At best, it was a pain in the ass. At worst, it could be a logistical nightmare, particularly if you were coming in from Japan or Europe. It’s the same thinking that has, I would argue, led the video games industry into the single worst year since its creation.
The Void Beckons
Fun fact: my first visit to E3, I was invited to a presentation by Ubisoft, and Geoff Keighley was sitting in the seat in front of me. By the end of that presentation, I was regretting not having punched him in the back of the head. His presence seemed to be intended to feed Ubisoft the sort of questions which read well in press releases but don’t really have much in the way of substance. And his self-aggrandizing elevation to the “big name” personality of the games industry absolutely pisses me off. When E3 was in trouble because of the pandemic, did Keighley do anything to pitch in and try to save the show? Hell, no! He went and stood up Summer Games Fest instead. What’s really troubling is that SGF did all of the same things E3 normally did, minus the face-to-face meetups, and the ESA wasn’t mentioned in the slightest. Did he approach the ESA and suggest the format, only to be shot down? Or did he just decide, “It’s Keighley time!”? We don’t know.
Regardless, the notion that The Game Awards (another Keighley invention) or SGF is somehow replacing E3 misses the point of what E3 was intended to be. At its core, it was supposed to be a trade event. It was supposed to be a way for retailers, publishers, and hardware manufacturers to showcase new products and talk business. The press would have had a perfectly legitimate interest in the proceedings. Did it go overboard on its remit, becoming a major multimedia spectacle? Yeah, probably. Could it have been dialed back? It’s possible, though there would have been some grumbling, to be sure. Could a scaled down E3 2020 have happened? If there had been the will to make it happen, yes.
What could have happened in this hypothetical E3 2020? The first thing that comes to my mind is dealing with the logistical snarls that were starting to crop up in the wake of COVID. They wouldn’t have had any control over the trucks and ships that get the products from point A to point B, but they could have tried to compensate for them. It would have been a chance for the ESA to show some initiative and leadership under adverse conditions, helping to keep the games industry in a healthier and more functional state than it was. The ESA would have been fulfilling its mission as a trade organization, and the E3s which might have been in 2021 and 2022 could have kept that going, potentially expediting supply chain issues and helping make it so retail stores weren’t bleeding to death in the streets. It would have been an expense, yes. But it also would have been an investment in the future, a way to demonstrate that even competitors can work together when the stakes are dire enough to require collaboration.
Alas, that was probably never going to happen. The games industry has devolved into warring camps, each of whom have the same battle cry: “Fuck you, I’m getting mine!” And even as they move off to handle their own directs, promote their own messages without any collaboration (or interference, if you look at it that way), each and every one of them is taking body blows. The scale of the layoffs we’ve seen this last year is staggering. The horror stories we’re getting as developers are shut down and teams are gutted beggars the imagination. And there’s no guarantee next year will be any better.
In The Ashes
Kyle Orland over at Ars Technica has written off E3 entirely, declaring it “a show that was built for a very different game industry and which has utterly failed to change with the times.” I would quibble about that last part. It did change with the times, until it couldn’t seem to change any further. It went from a simple trade show, mutated into a circus, and then morphed to a multimedia exposition. It became a cultural event which I think could have evolved into something truly astounding. All the pieces were there, but nobody seemed to figure out how to put them together, or how to take it to the next level.
Consider the Video Games Live concert, for one. Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall get the notion to bring different composers together to do live performances of songs from different games. Listening to your favorite game soundtracks on CD, MP3, or streaming is one thing. But hearing it live, sitting in an auditorium with a few thousand other people and watching these artists on stage in person, that’s something else entirely. There’s no abstraction, no layers between the sound and your ears, and it’s an experience I enjoyed tremendously. They’re still touring today, and I highly recommend grabbing tickets early if they come to your town.
Here’s another one: during my visits to E3, there was a showcase of art by various artists working for game companies. These were usually pieces of concept art, and usually prints rather than original canvases, but seeing them gathered together into an art exhibition just off the main concourse of the L.A. Convention Center was one of the soothing portions of those three days. When I could, I’d walk around between bookings, enjoy fine art by a dizzying array of artists that most people would never know about, and feel recharged when the next interview came around. As I recall, the last time I visited E3, that exhibition wasn’t around, and I badly missed it.
Music, art, business, all of these endeavors are made better by human interaction, in person, without layers between them. It’s fine and well to argue that direct marketing and digital distribution are more cost-effective, but they’re also completely soulless. They’re one-way channels which do not invite comment (and if you think all the chat messages flashing through on a Twitch stream are serious comment, think again). They’re perfectly controlled, perfectly curated, and utterly devoid of the human touch. Yes, you’re going to avoid embarrassment when you do something as stupid as Don Mattrick did with the Xbox One. But you’re also going to avoid getting the sort of buzz that can only come from a group of people in a room, large or small, who’ve witnessed something together. The sort of instant feedback that doesn’t rely on marketing managers and questionnaires.
We don’t have that kind of connection with a publisher doing a direct showcase. We don’t quite have that sort of shared experience watching The Game Awards. Some folks do, of course, but how many of them are the rank-and-file gamers who the games industry is trying to service? Between the meltdown of the games industry and the concurrent irradiation of the games journalism sector, we don’t have that human touch anymore, even through the proxies of journalists whose work we respect. All we’ve got is Geoff Keighley, and he’s yet to prove he can handle this kind of responsibility.
For now, E3 is dead and gone for good. I have to believe that a genuinely worthy successor can arise at some point in the future. But for now, we’re stuck with the cheapest substitute the suits are willing to cough up for. And the ESA should be deeply ashamed they couldn’t save it instead of trying to tell us how wonderful it is.
