Today, E3 sits in a landscape of events most of which, bluntly, justify their existence far better than the ESA's effort does. It was a time before streaming high resolution video, a time before the Internet both made the world a much smaller place, and made the hyper-local all the more relevant. The world was a very different place back then, though. Once, it was the only truly global event on the calendar back then, London had ECTS and Tokyo had TGS, but there was no question of them truly challenging E3's dominance. The problem is that the world has changed and E3 has not. Once the realm only of platform holders, now every major publisher has their own - and if EA and Activision's decision to go their own way entirely, leaving the E3 show floor, has no major negative consequences for them this year, you can be damned sure others will question the show's cost-value next year. It's not just EA and Activision, either even the companies who are actually exhibiting on the show floor seem to have taken to viewing it as an addendum to the actually important part of the week, namely their live-broadcast press conferences. It's for business, yet big players in the industry seem deeply dissatisfied with it. Hence the question what's the point? Who, or what, is E3 actually meant to be for? It's not for consumers, of course - they're not allowed in, in theory, though the ESA has come up with various pointlessly convoluted ways of letting a handful of them in anyway.
It wants to be a global show in the age of the local, in an age where "global" is accomplished by pointing a camera at a stage" The loss of Konami's once huge booth was inevitable given the company's U-turn away from console publishing, but the decisions of EA and Activision to pull out of the show this year will be felt far more keenly. This year, attendees at E3 will find it hard not to notice a number of key absences. Kentia refugees now fill gaps in the cavernous South Hall's floor plan, elevated to sit alongside a roster of the industry's greats that gets more meagre with each passing year. It now struggles to fill the convention centre's halls, and a while back ditched the Kentia Hall - which for years promised the discovery of unknown gems to anyone willing to sift through its morass of terrible ideas. There's one major difference, though E3 today is smaller. For all that the show's organisers regularly tout minor tweaks to the formula as earth-shattering innovation, E3 today is pretty much exactly the same beast as it was when I first attended 15 years ago - and by that point, the show's format was already well-established. Over the years, what was once by far the largest date in the industry's annual calendar has stuck out in various new directions as it sought to remain relevant, but it's always ended up falling back to the path of least resistance - the familiar halls of the Los Angeles Convention Centre, the habitual routine of allowing only those who can prove some industry affiliation to attend. I'm simply not sure what exactly the show's organisers, the ESA, think E3 is for any more.
What is the point of E3? I ask not in a snarky tone, but one of genuine curiosity, tinged with concern.
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