It’s official: E3 has been shut down as the video game industry’s biggest convention and media platform for good.
“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 Entertainment Software Association, the video game trade association, said on its X account Tuesday.
The ESA deciding to close down E3 as an event followed the 2023 edition of the Electronic Entertainment being canceled after several major game developers and companies, including Microsoft and Nintendo, announced they would not be in attendance.
The annual trade event for the video game industry had been set to take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center from June 13 to 16, 2023. That outing was also the E3 event’s second attempt to return as an in-person event after the onset of the pandemic.
E3 was first canceled in 2020 amid the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a virtual edition held in 2021 before a planned in-person return for 2022. But that edition was canceled both as an in-person and virtual event. E3 had drawn as many as 65,000 attendees and over 200 exhibitors in past years.
At the same time, E3 faced competition from game companies organizing their own virtual events to share news and next-generation product rollouts with consumers. And as they also hosted their own direct-to-consumer livestreams (such as Nintendo’s Directs, Sony’s State of Play events or even smaller, indie studios like Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games’ August news video), the importance of E3 as an in-person event also came into question.