After three years without a physical show and another totally white year in 2022, E3 is making a comeback. The president of ESA, organizer of the Los Angeles video game meeting, made the announcement to the Washington Post, promising a hybrid event.
It was therefore not necessary to bury it too quickly. The pulse of E3 was still beating and it even experienced a burst on Wednesday. The great American video game show will rise from its ashes, this is in any case what indicated Stan Pierre-Louis, the president of the ESA, organizer of the E3 and various Tech events.
In an interview given to washington posthe announced that the Los Angeles show would return in 2023 in a hybrid version, combining an online event and a physical event, as planned by Gamescom next August.
“A strong desire to reunite”
“ We are excited to return in 2023 with both a digital and in-person event,” said Stan Pierre-Louis.“We love these digital events, which reach a lot of people and we want that global reach, but we also know there’s a very strong desire for people to come together, to be able to connect in person, see each other and talk about what makes the games great”.
After two blank years physically due to the coronavirus pandemic, but with an online presence in 2021, and a late cancellation for 2022, E3 is therefore preparing to return. A totally sabbatical year to prepare his response to the rise of Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest which starts this Thursday, June 9 at 8 p.m. One more year also to settle the details of its online presence and forget the huge failure of the “search for friends” which had leaked the data of users registered on the site in 2021.
The return of E3 in physics would therefore meet an expectation of the entire industry, after three years marked by the absence of an in-person meeting. Many publishers and builders have become accustomed to online presentations a la Nintendo Direct or PlayStation State of Play. But all agree that a little something differentiating is missing in their contact with the media or the players in particular.
No date or place
The new highlights remained faithful to the summer period under the aegis of Geoff Keighley, who took on the role of ringmaster of video games with his various events (Opening Night Live, Game Awards, Summer Game Fest) and thus occupied the land left vacant by the E3. Same period of promotion of their novelties, (expensive) less cost of the show.
It is also on this point that the ESA and E3 will have to convince again the most emblematic participants who had already tended to desert the show in the pre-Covid years. “What’s great about all this experimentation is that players of all sizes are trying to figure out what works best to promote their product and content to share with gamers.reassures Stan Pierre-Louis. “And I think there’s a space for a physical show and it’s important to have a digital reach as well. Combining the two, I think there is something E3 can deliver. »
No date has been indicated for the return of E3 in 2023. Nor even a place for that matter. The Los Angeles Convention Center has been home to the show since 1995 and, apart from two pranks in Atlanta (1997) and Santa Monica (2007), it has remained faithful to it. However, for a few years, a move had been whispered about due to the high cost of the premises, but also because of the work that was to take place there. It is therefore uncertain that the E3 will resume its quarters there next year.
Geoff Keighley in ambush
But this return of E3 in force will not necessarily do Keighley’s business. And he hastened to let it be known by also implying that his Summer Game Fest could well have a different scope than simply digital. “The Summer Game Fest will always be an online-first show. But many other things will happen. Stay tuned“, he wrote on Twitter.
#SummerGameFest will always be a digital first show.
But there’s lots more about to happen! Stay tuned.
— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) June 8, 2022
Always quick to react to the announcements of E3 – we remember his rather rapid reaction when the show was canceled to say that he would be there – the former official speaker of the event did not given a physical dimension to its highlights of the year, which remain a “between-one-self” in the company of industry names and journalists. This year, for the first time, he wanted to organize a mini-event in physics to show games to a handful of handpicked journalists, but without the presence of an audience, an option taken by E3 in its last editions. .
But by showing up like this, he wants to remind publishers who currently only have him to exist — Xbox having too many internal studios to talk about during his conferences and PlayStation bowing to Japanese publishers before soon having the same concern as his rival — that they may have to choose sides in the future. In the meantime, he continues to establish his notoriety and prepares future video game battles.
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