E3 Is Officially Over Forever (theverge.com) 48
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: While the video game industry had already largely given up on E3 -- once the largest video game trade show in the industry and the biggest video game showcase event of the year -- there was always the chance it would return after multiple years of cancellations. However, in a statement to The Washington Post today, E3's organizer confirmed that the show is permanently canceled.
"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," Stanley Pierre-Louis, the CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, the nonprofit trade organization that ran E3, told the Post. Pierre-Louis alluded to the biggest reason for E3's precipitous collapse and ultimate demise: game developers and publishers had increasingly moved away from the event in order to put on their own less costly showcases targeted directly to fans, rather than the industry insiders and journalists that E3 typically catered to. The last E3 was held in 2019. The 2020 event was canceled due to the pandemic, only to return as a digital showcase in 2021. A virtual-only event was scheduled to take place the following year but was canceled, with promises that it would return in 2023. Then, that was canceled, with a possible 2024 return date. Now, it's been confirmed that E3 is never coming back.
"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," Stanley Pierre-Louis, the CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, the nonprofit trade organization that ran E3, told the Post. Pierre-Louis alluded to the biggest reason for E3's precipitous collapse and ultimate demise: game developers and publishers had increasingly moved away from the event in order to put on their own less costly showcases targeted directly to fans, rather than the industry insiders and journalists that E3 typically catered to. The last E3 was held in 2019. The 2020 event was canceled due to the pandemic, only to return as a digital showcase in 2021. A virtual-only event was scheduled to take place the following year but was canceled, with promises that it would return in 2023. Then, that was canceled, with a possible 2024 return date. Now, it's been confirmed that E3 is never coming back.
Re:E3 has been bleeding out for some time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everything is because of culture wars despite them being politically convenient to blame. C19 exposed how many lies we were living in terms from office culture to marketing to systems.
Re:E3 has been bleeding out for some time. (Score:4, Insightful)
And honestly... If you really think E3 was killed because of a lack of objectified women as 'booth babes' or because studios tried expanding their audiences to something other than socially awkward straight white males with misogynistic tendencies... Wow. You have some serious growing up to do.
Nice false equivalency (Score:1)
Yet oddly black rap culture which often objectifies women as whores and is chock full of aggressive man children and their associated BS is still revered. Bet you wouldn't criticise that though.
Hmm, are major electronics companies DIRECTLY sponsoring their work and slapping their names all over the place and asking them to represent them? Major international electronic brands are paying E3 to represent them. They're not commissioning these rap artists to write offensive music FOR their products.
Cool...you pointed out that an art form primarily associated with African Americans has issues with vague superficial similarities...yet almost nothing in common....you showed them libs!!!! Yup, no on
Re: Nice false equivalency (Score:2)
It must be straw man night for dumbasses who do understand analogies.
Re: Nice false equivalency (Score:2)
Dont understand. Thanks autocorrect.
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Why would you make such a stupid bet? It should be obvious that if I'm looking down on irrelevant objectification of women for the purposes of marketing to drooling morons in one case, I'd be doing the same in another.
But you're also putting all rap in one box, probably because you're not only a misogynist man-child upset by somebody calling them on it, but also racist.
Re: E3 has been bleeding out for some time. (Score:2)
And its woke buzzword bingo from someone with no argument.
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I don't think "wokeness" killed E3, but holy shit are there ever a lot of unintended implications in what you wrote. I also don't know what skin colour has to do with anything. I had assumed you were trolling but you got up-modded so I think what you're suggesting needs to be prodded at a bit for logic's sake.
So, first question: do LGBT+ women not enjoy looking at attractive women?
Is it "misogyny" that women's fashion magazines, targeted at women, feature models?
If yes, then why did Victoria's Secret recent
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The specific statements I was responding to were the claims that "inclusiveness", within the context of E3, means that there was a "non inclusive, prior version" of E3 where the primary demographic marketed to was "socially awkward straight white males with misogynistic tendencies" and the corollary that anyone who enjoyed the cancelled elements (such as booth babes) are the aforementioned ad hominem.
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> there was a "non inclusive, prior version" of E3 where the primary demographic marketed to was "socially awkward straight white males with misogynistic tendencies"
Pretty much. Note the word 'primary' was used and not 'exclusive'.
> the corollary that anyone who enjoyed the cancelled elements (such as booth babes) are the aforementioned ad hominem
Not necessarily. However, the people who are OUTRAGED at the accusation? Almost always.
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expanding their audiences to something other than socially awkward straight white males with misogynistic tendencies
This does pretty explicitly suggest that the only people who enjoyed the cancelled elements were reprehensible. It is not merely about those were are outraged at the change.
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And honestly... If you really think E3 was killed because of a lack of objectified women as 'booth babes' or because studios tried expanding their audiences to something other than socially awkward straight white males with misogynistic tendencies... Wow. You have some serious growing up to do.
That was just one of E3's poor attempts to remain relevant.
Ultimately it E3 stopped caring about the players (I.E. the people who ultimately lay out cash to buy games), so it stopped appealing to players, eventually the press fell off the bandwagon as no-one cared about E3 and the only people paying attention to E3 were the people advertising there. It became self perpetuating which ultimately is a negative feedback loop.
PAX ate their lunch years before CV19 came along, Covid just made E3's death a li
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Yeah, these big independent trade shows have been gradually falling by the wayside for the past couple of decades. First, advances in tech itself has made them much less necessary. Second, the individual companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Nintendo, etc. etc.) that were the heart and sould of these events are finding it much more useful to run their own in-house shows - where they don't have to share the spotlight with anyone else.
Honestly, I'm surprised CES is still limping along...
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If you remember around 15 years ago, E3 almost died before because there was too much focus on spectacle and booth babes that companies weren't getting value out of it. There's still a market for those things, but not at a gaming expo where more and more of their customers are women
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Sigh, the stupid, it hurts. Gotta make everything about stupid culture wars. Clearly expanding your audience kills it!
E3 was a press event. Originally it was the best way to get press attention to new products. It thrived when it was a press only event and it was the can't miss event of the year.
Then the internet got bigger. It became easy for anyone to stream events. We got social media to distribute news and build hype. The press didn't need E3. E3 tried to survive by opening up to everyone, but it just d
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It had to be done (Score:3, Funny)
E3 (Score:3, Interesting)
Whimpered death. I went the first few years it happened back when I was in the industry. Had to work the booth, but then got to spend time wandering around.. just so much ado about nothing. Really fought not to have to go after the first year because it was just not that interesting.
Re:E3 (then E4 and E5) (Score:2)
That's OK. It'll be replaced by E4 - the Expensive Electronic Entertainment Expo. Then by E5 - the Extremely Expensive Electronic Entertainment Expo.
Good (Score:1)
Good. There was no chance for E3 to recover. Mike Gallagher actively ruined E3 (and ESA as whole) from 2007 to 2018. He's bad at both business and technology. He never had the education or qualifications to be a CEO.
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What education or qualifications does one need to be a CEO? For example, could a college dropout with no work experience be a successful CEO? (Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are good examples, and Steve Jobs was at least close to that situation.)
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A large number of CEOs have liberal arts degrees. Something like 1/3 of Fortune 500 CEOs have liberal arts degrees.
For qualifications, having connections helps. No matter how much you fail, someone you know will be willing to hire you at some exhorbitant salary and perks.
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I actually think a liberal arts education is a good fit for something high level like a CEO position. It's not just depth of knowledge, but breadth that matters.
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You don't need much of anything, but it can be helpful. Main thing is don't be a complete asshole to your employees by pitting them against each other or firing your actual experienced talent in favor of some, new young talent that doesn't have any experience at all. Mike Gallagher breeds toxicity anywhere he goes, which is what completely disqualifies him.
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Sure -- and I can believe some random CEO would do those kinds of things, making him/her a bad CEO on the basis of leadership skills. The point of my original comment was that the only specific criticism laid against this CEO was lack of credentials -- and that credentials have at best a weak relationship with being a successful CEO.
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Fair, I guess I couldn't think of an as short and concise way to say his "track record" of actions and experiences up to that point made him an obviously bad choice. Since in my mind, those kind of become part of someone's qualifications over time.
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The primary qualifications are the ability to speak for significant lengths of time without actually saying anything and answering a ton of questions without actually answering any of them. It's a lot harder than it sounds.
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I maintain that most CEOs could be replaced by a magic 8 ball and nobody would even notice.
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Maybe if Game journalists reported on games... (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is game journalists became idiots like 10-15 years ago. You read PC Gamer in the 1990s, and it was about games.
You read PC Gamer today, it's about how Hogwarts Legacy is a bad game because it uses IP by JKR and that's bad, because Twitter DEI inclusivity, blah blah no one cares, talk about the game.
So yeah, no wonder game companies don't want to interact with "Game journalists" anymore. The whole profession could be replaced by Chat GPT and no one would notice.
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Sorry, I missed that review. Which mainstream or even close to mainstream source said this?
R.I.P. but (Score:3)
But I'm also not surprised.
Now that you can just put your games in your own app store, there isn't much need to convince retailers to buy your games. E3 existed for the middleman, and the middleman is DEAD. Why would anyone setup a booth at E3 when you can use that same budget to spam 100 million gamers with ads?
Penny Arcade won! (Score:2)
Their PAX event has outlived the event that made them create it.
I went twice in the 90s (Score:2)
It was pretty cool to see Douglas Adams there. I worked the show. Got some hardware and games to review. When it went mainstream, I think it stopped being relevant to actual gamers. As for booth babes, they were nice to look at but they did not make the show better or worse overall. Duke Nukem 3D has the most excellent booth babes, but they also had a booth dude dressed as Duke, steroids and all. He complimented my biceps, I shit you not.
E3 Killed Itself via PAX (Score:2)
E3 killed itself because it took far too long to cater to gaming fans, which is why Mike and Jerry created PAX. PAX was created as "the people's E3" and it gradually subsumed all of E3s sponsorship.
By the time they opened up to the public, it was about a decade too late.
No one has given a crap about E3 for a very long time - and E3 has no one to blame for that but themselves.
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Did it? I ask because it's not like PAX is immune to the same market forces that are causing companies to stop doing conventions and instead doing more online keynotes.
I think Apple showed that you don't need conventions to get press with their iPhone announcements. You can just announce you're going to hold a keynote, invite some press, and they'll show up and repeat what you told them to the world. Every time Apple does one of their keynotes, we get a day of Slashdot stories regurgitating every bullet poi
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