ESA / ReedPOP
The annual gaming expo, once known as E3, is finally getting closer to rebirth as a physical event. While information about the next edition of E3 remains scarce, this week’s big news suggests a crucial change in how the decades-old event will operate: a split between audience types.
The expo’s new showrunners at ReedPOP, an agency responsible for regional gaming and comics exhibitions such as PAX, EGX and Star Wars Celebration, confirmed Monday that E3 2023 has locked the venue and date range. Both will sound familiar to E3 fans: a weeklong period in the middle of June (specifically June 13-16) at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
This time around, E3 will more closely resemble game industry showcases abroad, such as Gamescom and Tokyo Games Show. The first two days of the event, dubbed “E3 Business Days,” will host only “registered industry personnel,” which ReedPOP says gamemakers, distributors, licensors and press will participate in. The third day of E3 2023 will act as an industry/public day hybrid, and the fourth will be open exclusively to public ticket purchases. During these two-day ‘E3 Gamer Days’, the event offers a theater full of ‘in-depth looks at highly anticipated titles’.
Maybe this one is fun for the average show goer
Based on our years of E3 coverage, we believe this structure will be a net positive for everyone in attendance. In the pre-COVID state of the expo, E3 primarily connected game publishers and developers to the logistics side of the industry: your Targets, Amazons, and Best Buys, along with global distribution partners, digital services, and other video game-owned companies. players get one way or another. At E3 of yesteryear, those people were the priority, not the average consumer audience or even the press.
Still, the ESA version of E3 sold tickets to a fanbase that had come to expect game exhibits to be fun. Most of the time, that wasn’t the case, thanks in large part to brutal queues for a limited number of gameplay kiosks – all while industry professionals waltzed along velvet ropes to skip those lines. Breaking down those audiences should provide more space for fans to play demos of anticipated games. ReedPOP’s announcement of a theater portion also suggests it wants to streamline public access to “exclusive” game presentations during the show — rather than have fans waiting in E3 lines to watch videos behind closed doors.
At press time, we still have questions about how the show will operate. Will the attendance split between industry members and public consumers be reflected by a change in the show floor once E3 Business Days gives way to E3 Gamer Days? Does this mean, will the third and fourth days of the show add more public gameplay kiosks for unreleased games? Also, ReedPOP’s other exhibits are largely characterized by third-party merchandise stands (i.e. clothing, “mystery boxes” and retro game resellers). Will that ReedPOP status quo carry over into their version of E3, despite those booths arguably missing the point of E3’s industry-exclusive days? (ReedPOP representatives did not immediately answer Ars Technica’s questions about these matters.)
But who will actually be at E3 2023?
Above all, E3 is defined by the video game developers and publishers that present there, but even before COVID forced the physical incarnation of the show to end, major publishers began to leave the show to emphasize their own physical and digital events. With no formal confirmation from participating publishers at this time, we are reading several tea leaves for industry events.
As for the consoles, this summer’s Gamescom saw the return of Xbox to physical events, but that console family’s handlers at Microsoft didn’t participate in ReedPOP’s PAX West 2022, just minutes away from its Seattle headquarters. Nintendo, to his credit, was formally present at both recent exhibits. Sony is the most exposing company since it withdrew from E3 2019, as the PlayStation branch liked to alternate between YouTube presentations and limited hands-on events for the press. The most recent PAX West was revealing about ReedPOP’s relationships with potential participating game makers; In addition to Nintendo, the September event’s show floor featured a scattered roster of recognizable game publishers, including Bandai Namco, Devolver, and several Embracer-owned subsidiaries. But Gamescom 2022, which is not affiliated with ReedPOP, shot a little higher with the inclusion of Xbox, Sega, and Ubisoft at its events.
What’s more, Game Awards and Summer Game Fest organizer Geoff Keighley, who was involved in some of this year’s Gamescom events, is moving on to a physical version of Summer Game Fest 2023. As a long-time behind-the-scenes organizer of E3 adjacent events, Keighley can expand his knowledge of major game publishers to fill out his own show floor in June 2023 — leaving the new version of E3 hungry for content. SGF 2023’s dates, location, and participating gamemakers are still unknown at the time of writing, but we’re already anticipating a showdown of some form for the bandwidth of the June 2023 game preview, both online and in person.
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