This year we have experienced a moment that many gamersit has hurt our souls and it has been to see how the most important video game fair in the world announced its celebration dates in this year 2023 and how, later, the trickle of companies that gave up going caused it to be canceled completely. Something that leaves the event mortally wounded for the future.
Obviously, when we state in the headline that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft stole the E3, we are not saying that they have committed a crime but that, figuratively, they are the ones who with their business decisions have caused the sector stopped trusting what was the most relevant fair of the entire planet. At least if we don’t count Japan, where they continue to celebrate their Tokyo Game Show as if it were another world.
Events without soul or interest
In any case, we cannot say that the three heavyweights are co-responsible for the closure of E3 to the same extent, since some made that decision before others and the last one, seeing the panorama, had no choice but to accept reality and leave. So in the first place we must place Nintendo, which was the pioneer that got off the boat a few years ago to give us their direct. For that moment at least, Sony and Microsoft continued with the Show.
While PlayStation and Xbox remained at the fair, nothing changed. Satellite companies continued to flock, with large stands and important announcements, in pre-E3 conferences that were the delight of the gamers. First because they really offered relevant news and then because we could see the faces of many developers livespeaking to a global audience that was watching them.
But the year 2019 arrived and Sony decided that it was getting off the boat because “it was a trade show without much commercial activity. The world has changed, but E3 hasn’t changed accordingly with it.” He even went so far as to affirm that he was only interested in “the stores and the journalists”, as if they had not taken advantage of the free publicity they received from the media around the world year after year. Also, curiously, that world other than Los Angeles did not affect Japan, where its TGS is still an unavoidable date on the calendar.
So the result of killing E3 is what we have now, a haphazardly scattered calendar of canned events that, as the last showcase from Sony –or any Direct from Nintendo–, they have neither soul nor interest because before the start Show television have already filtered almost all the news. It is what you have to record things many weeks in advance, that it is difficult to maintain the confidentiality of what is going to be told.
What about Microsoft?
The one that bears the least responsibility in all this is Microsoft because, surely, It is the one that has the most interest in the existence of an E3, as an umbrella brand that arouses the interest of all users regardless of which system they are fans or followers of. Those of Phil Spencer found themselves alone at E3, without Sony or Nintendo, so with all the logic in the world they thought that it did not make sense to continue within the fair.
So they all killed her and she died alone. And in that change the ones we have lost are the users that we had already gotten into the habit of getting up at dawn to watch the conferences from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, etc., like we do every year with the Oscars. Getting together with friends and knowing that there are one or two nights a year when we are going to sleep less. But that possibility was stolen from us and now we just have to give the play in Youtube. No more.
