In the wake of E3’s latest official death, maybe for good this time, I’ll offer my perspective on why it existed the way it did in the first place. The thing is, it didn’t start as an event for fans, as PAX did, and it didn’t start as a conference for game developers, as GDC did. It started as an event first and foremost for retail buyers, who were once, many years ago now, a critical part of the industry. These were the guys (mostly all guys) from Best Buy or Walmart who held the power to decide what products were actually stocked in stores. Today the physical game and movie section of a big chain store is a sad affair, but there was a time when this territory was very precious and hotly contested, since it was the main place you made money if you were a publisher of games. Therefore it was critical to get retailers excited about your new products, so they would buy lots of copies and dedicate a lot of shelf space to them.
One of the ways publishers would entice buyers to place their bets on their games was to convince them the games were already a big deal and that customers would be clamoring for them. I think most people have experienced some version of the way this works psychologically: if you act like a big deal, enough people will believe you are a big deal, and then you can bootstrap yourself into really being a big deal. My theory is that this is the main reason the booths and associated PR stunts at E3 quickly escalated in size and spectacle. (Another is that once your competitor starts upping their outlay, you have to keep up appearances, leading to an arms race, another disappointingly common pattern in human affairs.) It was all designed to convey one message to a very specific audience: our games are a super big deal, as you can see by how we’ve spared no expense here!
The buyers wouldn’t have cared if the games were good or not, or if they were personally excited for them. Their job was to get the right number of units of each product for their stores. Luckily for publishers, the guys working in games and movie purchasing for big retail chains during the period of E3’s heyday were mostly the type of guy you might imagine in that position. They worked in an office at headquarters and probably didn’t get a lot of excitement in their everyday lives; this meant you could really bowl them over with trailers at maximum volume, oceans of swag, “booth babes,” just being in Los Angeles, etc. I’m being a bit uncharitable here but I am willing to stereotype this type of guy because I want to paint a picture of who E3 was actually designed for. It wasn’t for the general public, and I would argue that even the media was a big, but secondary concern (it only seemed like it was all about the media because that’s the aspect we could see). The media presence wasn’t just there for the coverage, but also as part of the very spectacle they had come to document. After all, the very presence of press can make an event feel more momentous than it really is. The media personalities with camera crews toting big, professional cameras around simply fed more into the spectacle, in a circular, self-reinforcing way that people used to associate primarily with Hollywood before the internet and social media became the new home for that sort of thing. E3’s perceived exclusivity as an event only for people who could prove they were in the industry (or were a celebrity) added to the idea it was something special.
The rest of us were just along for the ride— the people who were either connected with the industry in one way or another, or able to scam a badge, which wasn’t that hard.
As digital sales grew and publishers started bringing their messages directly to consumers, the importance of fighting for physical shelf space declined, and so did the importance of courting the buyers. The obvious choice was to pivot to a fan-centric, PAX-style show, but even though E3 and PAX outwardly seem comparable, a truly public event is built with completely different priorities. As a publisher, you would do any song and dance for a guy who could put a million copies of your game across a thousand chain stores all around the country. What would you do for one fan who might buy one copy of your game? I could also add that the impression I often got was that the big publishers mostly did not love E3 even during its prime, since it was so expensive and distracting, but felt they had no choice but to be a part of it. To be a little fanciful here, it was like a bunch of noble houses spending ridiculous amounts of time and money preparing for an opulent annual ball, simply because everyone else was also doing it and it would be too embarrassing not to participate.
This isn’t to say that E3 wasn’t also as good a reason as any to check out some upcoming titles, meet up with your friends and peers, try to do business deals, go on adventures in the host city, make precious memories, and so on. E3 was big and it accommodated all of those things. But you can also do those things at any other show or conference. E3 was unique in its focus on spectacle, which it developed because of conditions that aren’t true anymore. I, for one, won’t miss it.
