I’m sorry, E3.
I didn’t know how good we had it.
c’mon, bring back E3.
They won’t, of course.
While E3 increasingly dabbled with making the event semi-public, the expo was already losing many of its stars.
YouTube and streaming video meant publishers could advertise directly to their audiences in environments they wholly controlled.
What we called ‘E3’ became a cluster of officially unassociated events taking place around the same week.
E3 not happening did not stop marketing from happening.
The calendar quickly filled withdozens of E3-esque online showcases and streamsacross June and July.
It had turned out to functionally be the same.
Marketing was still seen, hype was still generated.
But oh, the experience was so much worse.
Too many streams spread across too many weeks and each lasting too long.
It was just too much.
E3 was also tolerableeven enjoyable!because a dense concentration of marketing fosters spectacle.
Big companies trying to grab attention and out-do each other created a ridiculous energy that’s absent from NotE3.
Or, as was often the case, both.
E3 is as close as this industry gets to Eurovision, our Graham said in 2017.
This is for selfish reasons, too.
I miss E3 as a member of the games media.
I never attended E3 because despite a Catholic upbringing, even I don’t believe I deserve that punishment.
God, to think all this once took only a week!
E3 was dead before its online-only return in 2021.
It was doubly and triply dead when the ESA cancelled 2022’s plannedphysicalevent thenlaterthe online event.
Quintuply dead whenthey cancelled that too.
Now it’s sextuply dead, the final death.
If there’s one thing worse than E3, it’s NotE3.
