E3 2023 has been officially canceled, the Entertainment Software Association and event organizer ReedPop confirmed. The event was originally planned to run from June 13 to 16 at the Los Angeles Con…
I never expected it to return after they cancelled the event in 2020. Too many publishers comments about the benefits of doing their own thing, both in terms of expose and cost. Why would a publishers want to pay absurd fees to attend E3 only to compete for attention against 50 other publishers? It makes no sense at all.
Outside of aerospace and defence, these trade-driven events are pretty much dead.
I never expected it to return after they cancelled the event in 2020. Too many publishers comments about the benefits of doing their own thing, both in terms of expose and cost. Why would a publishers want to pay absurd fees to attend E3 only to compete for attention against 50 other publishers? It makes no sense at all.
Outside of aerospace and defence, these trade-driven events are pretty much dead.
I never expected it to return after they cancelled the event in 2020. Too many publishers comments about the benefits of doing their own thing, both in terms of expose and cost. Why would a publishers want to pay absurd fees to attend E3 only to compete for attention against 50 other publishers? It makes no sense at all.
Outside of aerospace and defence, these trade-driven events are pretty much dead.
It's still really good for the smaller players and for the larger publishers to discover those smaller players who could potentially become larger players in the future.
However, that said, there's a couple things working against that. First, large AAA publishers are growing increasingly conservative with the rapidly increasing costs of development and are increasingly unlikely to give a promising smaller developer a chance at a large publishing contract for a AAA budget game. This has almost completely disappeared from the publishing landscape compared to 20 years ago or even 10 years ago.
Secondly, the ability for smaller developers to self-publish on Steam means they are less reliant on the large publishers to make a game and monetize their game, albeit there are still significant advantages to being published by a larger publisher (even the mid size ones). But Steam allowing self-publishing means that it isn't get picked up and promoted by a publisher or give up on your dream of making a game.