The annual orgy of game marketing and hype that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo will be a little less hype-filled this year, as some of gaming's biggest publishers have decided not to buy space on the Los Angeles Convention Center show floor.
VentureBeat reports today that Disney Interactive and Wargaming won't have booths at E3 2016. The two major publishers join Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts, which announced in recent weeks that they are also opting out of the show (though EA will have a press event and "hands-on" demos at an off-site location in the days before the show starts).
Wargaming, which has maintained a large E3 booth since 2011, summarized the reasons for its departure in an e-mail to Venturebeat. "From a strictly business perspective, E3 just doesn’t fit our current direction," a company spokesperson said. "It’s a show that is very centralized on retail product, and as a free-to-play digital download gaming company, we’ve realized that while the show may be a good fit for lots of other publishers and developers, it’s currently not a great fit for us."
That probably understates the huge changes in the industry and the media that have made a big, over-the-top show like E3 less relevant for many companies. Once upon a time, E3 was an efficient way to gather representatives from the few major video game magazines (and some mainstream press outlets) together to help drive the marketing agenda for the entire year. Now rather than investing millions in a booth, it's much simpler to send an early build of your game to a few popular YouTube and streaming stars who can put the game directly in front of players. Or better yet, companies can simply launch the game in an early beta and let the fans see everything directly.
Competing fan-focused conventions like PAX can also offer publishers the opportunity to attract press coverage while reaching out directly to gamers simultaneously. Unlike similar international conventions like Gamescom and the Tokyo Game Show, E3 has never let members of the general public onto the show floor. When asked if there are plans to change this, the Entertainment Software Association's Rich Taylor told Gamesbeat, "I don’t think the answer is to roll up the bay doors in the back of the convention center and firing a starter pistol. I think it has to be strategic."
On top of all this, there are the changes in the game industry itself. The largest game publishers are increasingly focusing their efforts on fewer and fewer tent-pole blockbusters, making it harder to justify expensive show floor space for what might only be a handful of new games.Smaller independent developers can and do band together to get show space as "Indie Megabooth"-style conglomerates, but a crowded and loud show floor often isn't the best venue to show off these new and unheard-of games. And the makers of free-to-play, microtransaction-driven mobile and casual games usually would rather spend their marketing dollars on Super Bowl ads than glitzy show floor booths that their audience probably wouldn't pay attention to anyway.
The new E3 exodus isn't quite a low point for the show, which the ESA has put on since 1995. That came in 2007 and 2008, when E3 scaled back significantly to a more "intimate" format that included only 5,000 to 10,000 attendees (for context, last year's show attracted 53,000 industry members). This year's show won't be nearly that small. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo will still anchor the event with large, console-pushing booths, and major publishers like Bethesda (which held its first-ever E3 press conference last year) are at least partially filling the gap left by the departing big names.
Still, the absence of some of gaming's biggest companies is a recognition that E3 is not the agenda-setting, calendar-defining event it once was in the industry. In an increasingly fragmenting media and gaming landscape, the days when a single flagship show can serve the entire industry effectively may be coming to an end.
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