The Obligatory “Is E3 Dead?” Episode – 2022 Edition

scrapped due to COVID and some other factors. The conference has had some pretty major setbacks and controversies over the last few years, and frequently journalists and analysts have been left asking is E three still relevant? And have we seen the last of E three? So today I thought it would talk a little bit about what E three is and where it came from. So why E three is, or perhaps maybe why E three was and why things are so different today apart from, you know, the obvious

case of the pandemic. So spoiler alert, it's not just because of COVID, although obviously COVID plays a really big part. Okay, So to understand E three, we first have to go back to the early nineteen nineties, before there was a dedicated video game trade show in the United States. In fact, this was before there was even an organization that could

throw such an event. And we have to bring politics into this as well, because, as it turns out, political pressure is one of the factors that led to E three even being a thing. So the early nine nineties saw video games maturing. Actually maturing is kind of a weird word to use. Video games were including more controversial material. The video games of the eighties were largely tunish, unrealistic creations.

You know, pac Man's Ghosts were not particularly disturbing. Donkey Kong was a tribute to King Kong, and while determined to throw barrels at poor jump Man, who would later evolve into Mario, he wasn't particularly concerning either. Heck, all the earliest arcade games, I would have to say Frogger was potentially the most upsetting because I hated seeing that little green guy get smushed by a car. Anyway, my point is that games couldn't be terribly explicit simply because

they lacked the fidelity to do that. You did have occasional computer games that got a little bit racy, the text based and titillating Lee titled The Leather Goddess of Phoebus, pushed the envelope a bit, though honestly the game was fairly tame, and the leisure suit Larry series indulged in juvenile male fantasies, straight male fantasies, i should say, but it featured really primitive graphics, so it wasn't, you know, particularly explicit. It was explicit and intent, but the graphics

failed to be able to carry through that. So for the most part, games were at least a couple of layers of abstraction away from being realistic. And then as hardware and software became more sophisticated, it became possible to create more graphic content and there was a demand for that kind of game, so game designers began to meet that demand. One famous example of this was the Mortal

Kombat games. So fighting games were not a new thing, but Mortal Kombat's focused on blood and violence, particularly with the fatalities that gamers could pull off if they knew the right combo to do. Those caught a lot of attention, and on the more lascivious front, there were games like night Trap, which was a full motion video game. Uh full motion video is when you use actual video footage within a game. And that game night Trap, it featured you as player that's peeping in on a lot of

young women and a sleepover, running around in nightgowns. Now, the point of the game was that you were ostensibly trying to protect those young women from intruders who were inside the house, but really most folks just focused on the fact that you're kind of a peeping tom. The game companies were thriving on controversy, as the concern over the games would naturally lead to greater interest in those

games and sales numbers would go up. But that also meant that lawmakers, particularly those who were the think of the children type of lawmakers, were pretty certain that these games were a harmful influence on the young. It's a story that we've seen again and again, from Rock and Roll to Dungeons and Dragons to video games, that you know video games are somehow the domain of children, that only children play video games, and that this content clearly

is not suitable for children. Now today, I think a lot of folks are aware that video games are something that people of all ages enjoy, but I suspect are still some fossils and leadership roles who can't get their heads wrapped around that. Anyway, the US Congress was threatening to set up a government agency that would assign essentially decency ratings to video game releases. The video game industry, in an attempt to sidestep governmental oversight, elected to create

its own ratings board. To do that, the industry first formed an organization that originally was called the Interactive Digital Software Association or i D s A. That group would later in two thousand three, rebrand itself as the Entertainment Software Association or e s A. And I'm just gonna use E s A from here on out, but just you know, be aware that before two thousand three it was the I D s A. After two thousand three it was E s A. Same organization though anyway, what

would become the E s A created the Entertainment Software Ratings Board or e S r B. And it's this group that evaluates games and assigns an appropriate age rating to those video games. So it's a lot like the mp A A, which does a similar thing for cinematic films. Now let's finally get to some E three stuff. Now I would argue there are two really big factors that made E three necessary. One was that as a whole, the video game industry didn't have the respect of the

broader tech sector. While video game companies would occasionally secure a booth at other major general tech trade shows like c e S, they were frequently pushed out of the way of main show traffic. So there are famous stories of companies in the games industry being forced to set up in leaky tense out in the parking lot outside the Las Vegas Convention Center with only access to like

porta potties and no access to food. And you know, leaky tents are a bad shelter if you've got a lot of television's computers and game consoles running in an effort to show off various games. The video games industry itself was actually picking up a lot of momentum, so it seemed really insulting to these companies that they should

be pushed so far off the main show floor. Uh. And you know, video games have been popular in the eighties, but that popularity was really starting to pick up in the nineties, and yet publishers, distributors, developers, and others in the business they didn't have trade show opportunities that would help them do business and aid in discovery, you know, using the press and media, and just generally achieve the goals of your typical trade show. So there was a

need there. But another factor that made E three and necessity is that something needed to foot the bill for the s A and the E s RB. There needed to be a way to fund the organization that existed so that the games industry could keep the US government off its collective back and a trade show could be really profitable if run correctly. Game companies could spend bookoos of buckos to get show floor space. You could charge industry attendees a fee to get a badge that guarantees entry.

Press would be allowed free entry upon successful registration, as the press would elevate everyone else at the show. So there was this financial need for something like E three as well. And so in nine the future E s A would organize the very first Electronic Entertainment Expo, providing an alternative to the summer session of ce S. Because back in those days, c e S actually held two

shows a year. These days it has scaled down to a single show held in January in Las Vegas, Nevada, generally speaking, companies use E three to promote upcoming hardware and video games, often splurging for massive press events that stacked video game trailers and hardware demos to drive up anticipation for upcoming releases. You also typically see celebrity cameos in these where you get some celebrity to come out and announce a game. You also see a lot of

cringe e kind of sketches and attempts at comedy. And there have been a lot of big announcements at E three over the years, including announcements for games and systems that never actually came out, and then there are a few that did come out but severely underperformed. I'm looking at you, fall Out seventy six. Oh and initially there was one other important element to E three. It was an industry only event, so the only people allowed to attend the show were people who were in the video

games industry or journalists who covered that industry. The general public was not allowed entreat to E three, which of course gave the event a type of exclusivity that made gamers really want to go. So if you ever need to have people really want to go someplace, just tell them they're not allowed to go there. Piece of cake. It takes care of itself. Now, we're actually gonna skip around a bit in the history of the three because I've already done some episodes about E three in the

past and covered the history in greater detail. So we're going to talk about some big moments in E three that threatened the show's existence. Because this is not the first time people have asked the question, is E three doomed? Is it not coming back? Uh? And I'm not gonna dwell on disastrous press events like the ones that the

individual companies have held. There have been lots of those, some combining you know, cringe worthy entertainment and wooden presentations to lackluster response, and like, there are numerous press releases that kind of vie for the title of worst E three press release ever or press event ever. So those definitely happened, and most of those press events had at

least a few low spots. Some of them had more low spots than anything else, and those can stand out as an embarrassing footnote in a video game company's history, but they weren't really a threat to E three's very existence. So while it would be fun to talk about really big misfires and press event history and E three that's done. What this show is really going to focus on. All right, when we come back after this break, we'll talk about some of the things that happened in E three's history

that really put it on unsure footing. But first these messages. From the beginning, the E s A organizers chose the Los Angeles Convention Center as the location for E three. However, in the E s A move D three to my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, because well, in some accounts it's because the l A Convention Center needed to have some renovations, and in others it's because contract negotiations between the E s A and the convention center had kind of fallen through.

So the move to Atlanta was a bump. Be one, there were fewer exhibitors who would actually make the journey out to Atlanta. There were a lot of companies that had a West coast presence but not an East coast one, and they just said, no, it's too expensive and difficult to go all the way there and set up a show. We're not gonna do it. And a lot of attendees felt that the Atlanta show was just inferior to the one in Los Angeles that was harder to navigate and

just less satisfying. So a stumbled that was that early in E three's history was a bit concerning. However, E three would recover and it would return to Los Angeles in now from two thousand and six. The show grew year over year, and as the show got bigger, companies felt compelled to make a larger presence there. That meant spending a lot more money. Companies would shell out huge amounts to create spectacular booths and hold flashy press events

complete with celebrity cameos. I remember one year I went and I saw the the booth for Fallout New Vegas, and I could only see it from the outside because it was walled off and you had to have an invite to go in, and I did not have an invite. But man, there must have been a lot of money

spent just making that booth look so incredible. This was also an era where you started seeing, you know, more celebrity cameos, and there was this prevalent trend of hiring young women to staff booths in an effort to entice people to come into them because In these years, the video game industry was still largely focused on catering to young straight men, not entirely, but predominantly, and so this was the so called booth Babe became a booth standard.

Just to be clear, I don't mean to diminish the women who played that part. They were taking a gig, and a gig is a gig. My judgment is more toward the general trend of objectifying women for the purposes of pulling in more foot traffic. Really objectifying women in general, but specifically like using them as advertisement is to get people to come into the booth. So my judgments not aimed at the women themselves, but rather this kind of

objectifying tendency. Moving on, one challenge E three had early on was in timing. The show Originally would happen in May, so for a company to really take advantage of the three, it needed to have something to show off at E three, and a lot of video game companies really focus on getting releases out so that they're available during the holiday shopping season so late in the year, but that meant that May was sometimes too early for companies to really

have something to show off. So E three would gradually shift over to June to give the industry a little bit more time to prep something, because there's nothing like attending a trade show but having nothing to exhibit other than games that have already released. By two thousand and six, the E s A, because by now it was officially called that, was getting complaints from various game companies. Some of those companies were threatening to drop out of future

shows because the costs were getting out of hand. E three had become such a huge party of a show that it was eating too much out of company budgets, particularly for the larger companies that were competing against the other larger companies. And so in light of these criticisms, the E s A made the decision to scale E three back dramatically. The two thousand seven show wouldn't happen

at the l A Convention Center at all. Instead, it was moved out to Santa Monica, California, and would be in several hotels as opposed to a central convention center. The event itself adopted the name the E three Media and Business Summit, which, hey, you know, that's one way to take sexy out of the event. It also moved

to July. The e s A cap attendance to around ten thousand people, which was a dramatic reduction from previous years, And in two thousand eight, E three returned to the Convention Center in Los Angeles, but was a much much smaller event, with attendance capped to around five thousand people. That party atmosphere was gone and costs were way down, but interest in the event also dropped. There wasn't a lot of media coverage, and big companies began to rethink

their objections to the extravagance of previous years. The E s A received several new complaints, which I suspect is exactly what they anticipated and in fact, is what they wanted. After all, leading up to the two thousand six decision, the E s A was raking in millions of dollars

through E three. It was an incredibly lucrative event, and then with the big companies complaining and threatening to drop out, that became an existential threat to E three because if the big companies dropped out, well, other companies might follow and E three would just cease to exist. So by scaling way back and giving the big companies what they asked for and thought they wanted, the E S He was able to show that what those companies thought they

wanted wasn't actually what they wanted. If that was the essays plan. It was a calculated risk that paid off, But that really could have been the end of the three right then and there. Now. One thing that did shake E s A up a bit was that in two thousand eight, Activision, fresh off its acquisition of Blizzard, pulled the eject cord not just on E three but

also the E s A as well. Activision had been one of the founding members of the E s A back when it was the I D. S A. So this was a big deal and it was a sign of things to come. And in two thousand nine things started heading back into the more splashy, extravagant, and more importantly expensive direction for E three. I also think two thousand nine was the first E three I attended, so I went the year that it shifted back toward becoming

a big spectacle. For a few years, E three flourished, but things began to shift as early as that was the year that Nintendo changed it's E three strategy. Now, previously, the company had done the usual routine, which involved holding an in person live press event in front of an audience, and you would have presenters revealing game trailers and footage, and occasionally scripted conversations between people that was tried to be passed off as like natural conversation that never worked,

by the way. Instead, Nintendo decided to go and present digital pre taped segments, which makes sense. You have far more control there, like you can do take after take until you get it right. When it's live, you get one shot, and if it went wrong, well that's that's live theater for you. It's one of the things I love about live theater. It's one of the things big companies hate about live prece events because unless everything goes perfectly,

it could become a disaster. So this was the beginning of what would become Nintendo Direct, and over time, Nintendo would actually shift these digital presentations away from E three timelines entirely, which freed up Nintendo to reach its audience on the company's own schedule, rather than having to account for a trade show schedule thrown by an independent organization. In Electronic Arts or e A left E three and started its own event held before E three would actually start.

So Electronic Arts had its own specific event catering to e A's announcements, and I gave e A the chance to really stand out without having to compete against all the other companies, and so it could hold the spotlight for itself. And e A was a big enough company to pull this off. As we will see, this was the beginning of a trend. We'll be back to talk

about this more after these messages. Okay, So we talked about how Activision had pulled out of E three, how Nintendo gradually migrated away from E three, and how Electronic Arts would do the same. Blizzard, which by this point was part of Activision. Blizzard would also begin to sit out E three. Since two thousand five, the company had been holding its own fan event called blizz Con, and slowly blizz Con became the main showcase for upcoming Blizzard titles.

So instead of revealing that stuff at E three, Blizzard would reveal it at blizz Con in front of rabid Blizzard fans because it was the best chance for getting that big reaction that could help promote upcoming titles. Like e A and Nintendo, Blizzard saw the value of catering to its fans directly on its own schedule without the distraction of other game companies vying for the spotlight. In two thousand nineteen, we saw Sony pull out of E three.

That was a truly tremendous blow. For years, one big discussion around E three was always around who quote unquote one the show, and typically the conversation was did Nintendo, did Xbox or did PlayStation win the show? Did Sony win?

Did Microsoft win? But by two thousand nineteen, Nintendo was no longer really a prominent presence, at least not at press events, and Sony was gone to Microsoft would remain, and of course video game companies would still bring Nintendo and PlayStation systems and games to the show in order to demonstrate them. So it's not like you would walk into E three and all you would see would be

PCs and xboxes. There were other systems there, but those withdrawals stirred a lot of talk about E three kind of losing its purpose, that more and more company knees were drifting away from E three. Now, something else that cheesed off a lot of folks in the industry happened in twenty seventeen. That was the first year that the Essay decided to sell tickets for E three to the general public. Now that first year they kept ticket sales at fifteen thousand, and of course tons of people were

eager to get in there. They had seen the videos of extravagant press releases with celebrity appearances. They'd seen footage of folks getting to play games that the rest of us would have to be, you know, waiting around for months or years to try. And for two decades the general public had been told it was not welcome to attend. So of course those tickets sold out in a heartbeat. But here's the thing. E three was not organized to handle that kind of experience or traffic. That's not what

E three was built to do. There were other fans centric events that were far better prepared and designed to handle the general public. The Penny Arcade Expo later just known as PACKS is a big one. PACKS events see tens of thousands of attendees, and generally speaking, these events have a reputation for being well organized and well run.

But E three was a different beast, and so a lot of folks discovered their ticket really just gave them the opportunity to wait in a line for four or five hours and order to play just about ten minutes worth of video game content. It hardly seemed worth it, but selling those tickets was a big source of revenue, and the E s A was not going to stop, nor was it going to put in the right amount of time and effort to adjust the experience to better suit an event open to the general public. So it

kind of shows the worst of both worlds. It alienated the industry attendees who found it increasingly difficult to navigate the show floor, and it disappointed fans who had traveled really long distances and spent a lot of money to attend an event that was pretty poor as a return on investment. There were other massive problems too. One of those happened in two thousand nineteen when folks discovered that the e ESA had been terribly negligent with attendee personal data.

On the E s A website, there was a way to access attendee personal information, which led to tons of folks effectively being docked by the e s A, including lots of video game journalists in fact, primarily video game journalists. Now, I'm not sure if anyone I know personally was affected by this, but certainly people that I admire and follow were And y'all, if you haven't followed video game journalism,

you don't know how ugly that stuff can get. Passionate gamers can get very opinionated about people who failed to fawn over a specific game system or title. Someone who is a die hard fan can take personal offense to a less than glowing review, and several game journalists have found themselves the targets of online abuse and worse. So with this, dock sing and meant that those threats could

extend beyond online harassment and into the real world. And considering that the ugliness of gamer Gate wasn't that far in the rear view mirror, I mean gamer Gate really got started in two. There was a very real threat going on here, particularly for women who appeared in that database.

A lot of the names on that list, which it also wasn't every attendee at E three, it was like two thousand of them, but a lot of those names were media and social influencers, So as you can imagine, that prompted a pretty harsh reaction to the essays negligence.

While the e s A pulled the initial list down, other people found older databases that were still accessible from the SAS site, so people who had attended past E three's E s A would take care of those two, but the organization had severely tarnished its reputation among the media, which you know, for a trade show big on press

events was not a good move. In twenty eighteen, there were reports that emerged that the E s A itself had a toxic culture, and that there were allegations that the then president of the association, a guy named Mike Gallagher, would frequently pit his employees against one another, and he

also had a tendency to insult his subordinates. The complaints prompted an internal investigation, and in October two thousand eighteen, Gallagher stepped down from the E s A and was replaced by Stanley Pierre Louis, who initially was an interim president but who has since taking the job on a

more permanent basis. The E s A had planned to increase the number of tickets sold to the general public in to twenty five thousand, with the E s A saying that E three would become a fan and media festival, which sounds like the SA's plan was to try and make E three more like a PAxx and less like a trade show. That kind of makes sense, as a lot of the big names had already withdrawn from E three, which you know, meant that they were opting to hold their own events and head so E three had to

do something to adapt. Jeff Keiley, a journalist who rose to fame in the G four TV days and who had spearheaded the development and production of the Game Awards, and also a man who hosted an enormously popular event called E three Colosseum, announced in early twenty that he would not be attending E three that year. That was a pretty big announcement because Keeley had become a big part of E three for several years, arguably serving as

one of the faces of E three. As it would turn out, his decision to sit this one out would end up being moot. And that's because of a little thing called COVID. As epidemics evolved into a pandemic, it became clear that big gatherings filled with lots of people in close proximity to one another might not be such

a good idea. E three, which was in the middle of this kind of identity crisis between trade show and fan Expo made the decision to pull the plug on the event and canceled the twenty ty d show entirely. Keiley would end up organizing a digital event called the Summer Game Fest, which for several companies served a similar function as E three. It gave them a chance to promote upcoming games and tease some that were in earlier

stages of development. Keely and crew have continued with the Summer Game Fest, the most recent one being just a week ago. Unlike E three, the Summer Game Fest isn't confined to just a week. It can theoretically stretch across the entire summer and give developers more opportunities to prep the best digital event that they can muster in one. E three would return, but only as a digital event. There would be no show floor or heavily attended press events.

Companies put together digital video packages that could stream out to an eager public, most of whom were stuck at home anyway due to COVID. Initially, E s A hoped to break E three back in twenty twenty two, but obviously that fell through as well, and plans for a digital event never emerged, so in and in two there was no E three at all. That didn't stop various companies from holding their own digital events, announcing video game titles and showing off trailer and gameplay footage. We've seen

several of those over the last couple of weeks. In fact, for the record, the e s A says that it does plan to have an event in T three, but most folks now suspect that whatever that event turns out to be is going to be very different from the E three's of the past. Maybe it will be a better run fan experience, something that lets people share their love of games with a community of fellow fans. That

would be cool. Maybe it will be the type of event that will inspire multiple companies to participate and tap into that fan enthusiasm. That would also be cool. But a lot of people have written off the three, essentially saying the event itself is dead, at least as it was initially envisioned. It's dead. Back in the web was still new, dynamic web pages capable of streaming video and

holding live chats were not really a thing. Companies, particularly big companies, didn't have an easy way to reach out to other industry players, from retailers to the press, but today things are very different. The very technologies that allowed so many of us to shift to working from home are the same ones that facilitate communications between big companies and everybody else. And like I've said a few times during this episode, companies can now do this on their

own schedule. They don't have to rush to get a presentation ready for a trade show. They don't have to fudge gameplay footage and hope no one notices that's actually a cinematic designed to look like game footage. They don't have to hire comedians to tell cringe worthy jokes or show a complete lack of interest or knowledge about games. There are so many stories of press events where the host nearly had no no knowledge of video games in general and no interest in it, and it just sucked

the life out of the event. It means that they don't have to hire circ dislay to come out and the alienate a captive audience for three hours, and yes, that did happen once. Now, one group that is definitely hit very hard by E three's diminished importance would be the independent game developers. These are people and companies that lack the resources and reach to hold big digital events. That get lots of attention. These people who have made

some truly incredible games. Some of my favorite games of the last several years came from small independent developers. They're in danger of losing a platform that otherwise would let them find their audiences. Some companies like Sony and Microsoft will invite independent developers to take part in larger digital presentations, so it's not all hopeless, but for many of these small to mid range players in the space, the loss

of E three is a really tough one. As for what I think about E three and it's diminished presence in the video game industry, uh, I'm okay with it. I didn't care for E three selling tickets to the general public because it did make my job a lot harder. Um not that I wanted to be elitist and say like I got to do something that no one else got to do, but rather I couldn't cover nearly as much because I just couldn't be the places I needed to be because there were too many people between me

and where I needed to go. So I was really frustrated because the purpose for E three had changed, but my purpose of being at E three had not changed. So after that I just decided to stop even applying to go and I sided out. I thought, well, you know what, there are plenty of other outlets out there, most of which have huge presence, and they can cover this much better than I could. I'll just look at the coverage and go from there. So I'm not really

sad to see the three go in that sense. If E three does come back as a more fan oriented experience that actually delivers on that promise, I'm all for it. I want people to have that experience of being excited about video games, get that chance to get their hands on stuff that hasn't come out yet, to give the companies the chance to promote their work. I want all

that to happen. I just don't need to be there, and I do need it to be well run, because as it stood before the pandemic, the way E three was being run just was not a positive experience for most people. I mean, I can't imagine having spent all that money to travel to Los Angeles, maybe get a hotel room, buy a ticket to go to E three, and then get to play maybe two demos, maybe three. If I was really lucky, maybe I can play a

few more. If I wanted to play stuff that just it's kind of like cheap mobile games or something, but like the big name stuff, You're lucky if you could do more than a couple just because the lines are so long that you'd be dedicating most of your day just waiting to play. It's not great. That wraps up this episode of text Stuff. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have suggestions for topics that should cover in the future, you can always let me know through the talkback feature

on the I Heart Radio app. Just navigate over to the tech Stuff podcast page. You'll see a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a message up to thirty seconds in length. You can let me know if you want me to use the audio too, and I'll use it in upcoming episodes, or of course, you can reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I

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