One of the reasons the now dead E3 transformed from an industry trade show into a 3 day pseudo-party of spectacle and mayhem was because it was the core source of funding for the Entertainment Software Association, the lobbying arm of the games industry.
Ironically, they tried to dial it back in the mid 2000s and turn it in to a more closed event due to some of the industry titans fearing the lack of control they have over bloggers that they have over more established press. However, at that point it became too materially important to their funding and since ramping up charges on key members of the group wasn't gonna fly, they were forced to dial it back and adapt to the internet era.
Anyway, this post isn't about E3 proper, this is more about the ESA it funded and why like E3 we had both a friend and foe relationship, and like E3 the "friend" part of the equation slowly withered away.
We know what you're thinking, "metroplex, you overwhelmingly sexy charismatic beast, you're a huge commie, why would you ever like any capitalist lobbying group." Well, part of it was we weren't as politically developed at the time. However, the main reason was, in the grand tradition of historical materialism, a result of the conditions of the time.
For a 20 year period gaming was the political scapegoat du jour. Politicians built their entire careers on being anti video game, and it seemed a cultural default of pearl clutching "think of the children" boomers.
(A lot of this was the growing pains of accepting tech into mainstream culture, it's likely not a coincidence that when boomers started embracing Facebook in the 2010s the attacks against gaming faded away).
This started as far back as the early 90s against some of the early fighting games (particularly Mortal Kombat), got more momentum when DOOM was popular later that decade, and came to a head with the GTA 3 trilogy, particularly the infamous Hot Coffee scandal.
It's hard to state just how much of a culture war battleground gaming was in the 90s and 2000s. Things that seem inane today like people in churches playing HALO were huge cultural flashpoints. First person shooters taking place in facsimiles of real life locations (that didn't involve World War 2) lead to people losing their shit. The fact that Mass Effect had a (relatively tame) Sex scene lead to a Fox news hit piece against it.
Anyway, under those conditions, an industry lobbying group fighting against it was just what the doctor ordered in order to keep the medium alive at all. Gaming and to a lesser extent tech in general was a political soft target who wasn't established in Washington and couldn't fight back. The very fact that the ESA existed was a threat to this paradigm, so much so that Jack Thomson (who was THE anti-gaming culture warrior at the time) compared ESA head lobbyist Doug Lowenstein unfavorably to Saddam Hussein.
So yeah, at the time it was needed. However, even then, the ESA and us didn't always see eye to eye. They were responsible for locking out access to abandonware, making unduly harsh copyright controls, and they even mobilized ICE (yes, THAT ICE) to clamp down on console mod chips.
However, by the 2010s these controversies were a thing of the past. They tried to reinvoke that spirit with games like Hatred, but it was too late, the goose had already been cooked. Put very simply, we the people who give a shit about the medium of gaming, we won.
(Then a new evil arose and the call was coming from inside the house, which culminated in the harassment campaign of Anita Sarkeesan and later Gamergate, but that's a different post for a different time).
Put simply, we don't need the ESA anymore, just as we haven't needed E3 anymore in the age of streaming. Their existence is strictly a negative now in the age where the IP industry has become the chokeholders and gatekeepers of creativity and ideas.
The ESA was a useful tool to be in conditional tactical unity with during the conditions of the time, but those conditions are now since gone; not unlike E3.