This year’s E3 game show has been canceled, not even in digital format. Recently, many game publishers have announced that they will not be present at the fair, so there are likely to be very few large companies. The organization says it is now assessing the future of the fair.

Create the ESA and ReedPop regulators on the E3 website It was announced that the exhibition, which was scheduled to take place from June 13 to 16, will not take place. When announcing the 2023 edition of the show, there was “interest” from exhibitors, the industry, the media and “certainly audiences”. But in the end there were “challenges that proved too big to overcome,” says ESA’s president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis v. GamesIndustry.biz.

Pierre-Louis says that many companies have indicated that the game’s development timeline has been “adjusted” since the start of the Covid pandemic. In addition, the current economic times would have caused gaming companies to “rethink how they invest in major marketing events”. As a third reason, Pierre-Louis explains that companies are starting to experiment to “find the right balance between physical and digital events.”

Although Pierre-Louis doesn’t say it out loud, it seems that in the end there will be very few participants at E3. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony already indicated in January that they would not be present at the show, and earlier this week it also emerged that Ubisoft would not be going to the show. Sega and Tencent later indicated that they weren’t going either.

ESA wanted to stage a 2023 edition with ReedPop, better known as PAX, Star Wars Celebration and New York Comic Con, among others. This will be the first time since 2019 that E3 will be held physically again. Pierre-Louis says the ESA still believes in the “industrial commercialization and clustering” platform, but that the organization needs to “strive the right balance between the current and ongoing needs of industry.” The CEO of ESA declined to confirm if E3 will return next year.