E3
E3 was an annual trade event for the video game industry organized and presented by the Entertainment Software Association. It was held principally in Los Angeles from 1995 to 2019, with its final iteration held virtually in 2021. The event hosted developers, publishers, hardware manufacturers, and other industry professionals who used the occasion to introduce and advertise upcoming games, hardware, and merchandise to the press. During its existence, E3 was the world's largest and most prestigious annual gaming expo.
E3 included an exhibition floor for developers, publishers, and manufacturers to showcase their titles and products for sale in the upcoming year. Before and during the event, publishers and hardware manufacturers usually held press conferences to announce new games and products. Before 2017, E3 was an industry-only event; the ESA required individuals wishing to attend to verify a professional relationship with the video game industry. With the rise of streaming media, several press conferences were broadcast to the public to increase their visibility. E3 2017 became open to the public for the first time, with 15,000 general-admittance passes for those who wanted to attend.
When hosted in Los Angeles, E3 was held in the Los Angeles Convention Center. The event was cancelled for the first time in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the event in 2021 was held as a virtual event to mixed reception. The 2022 event was cancelled also due to the pandemic, and with no virtual event held. The ESA had planned to return to a full in-person convention in 2023 with a new format, including a fan convention component at a separate venue in collaboration with ReedPop.
The pandemic further accelerated the use of standalone presentations by individual publishers and media outlets to promote upcoming games directly to consumers, development timelines usually aligned around the convention had been disrupted, and publishers were increasingly concerned over the costs of exhibiting at the convention. E3 2023 was cancelled after all major publishers pulled out of the event. E3 2024 was also cancelled in September 2023 in order to evaluate plans for 2025. On December 12, 2023, the ESA announced that E3 would no longer be held.
The E3 website in August 2025 was updated to say "ESA's conference and trade show is changing directions."
History
Origins
Before E3, game publishers went to other trade shows like the Consumer Electronics Show and the European Computer Trade Show to display new or upcoming products as well as to pre-sell shipments to retailers for the rest of the year including the late-year holiday season as well as to view for press coverage of upcoming games. As the game industry grew rapidly during the early 1990s, industry professionals felt that it had outgrown the older trade shows. According to Tom Kalinske, CEO of Sega of America, "The CES organizers used to put the video game industry way, way in the back. In 1991, they put us in a tent, and you had to walk past all the porn vendors to find us. That particular year it was pouring rain, and the rain leaked right over our new Genesis system. I was just furious with the way CES treated the video game industry, and I felt we were a more important industry than they were giving us credit for." Sega did not return to CES the following year, and several other companies exited from further CES shows.Separately, in 1994, the video game industry had formed the Interactive Digital Software Association in response to attention the industry had drawn from the United States Congress over a lack of a ratings system in late 1993. The IDSA was formed to unify the video game industry and establish a commission, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to create a voluntary standard rating system that was approved by Congress.
The industry recognized that it needed some type of trade show for retailers. According to Eliot Minsker, chairman and CEO of Knowledge Industry Publications, "Retailers have pointed to the need for an interpretive event that will help them make smarter buying decisions by interacting with a wide range of publishers, vendors, industry influentials, and opinion leaders in a focused show setting." Attempts were made between the video game companies and the Consumer Electronics Association which ran CES, to improve how video games were treated at CES, but these negotiations failed to produce a result. Pat Ferrell, creator of GamePro which was owned by International Data Group, conceived of an idea for starting a dedicated trade show for video games, building off IDG's established experience in running the Macworld convention. Ferrell contacted the IDSA who saw the appeal of using their position in the industry to create a video game-specific tradeshow, and offered to co-found the Electronic Entertainment Expo with IDG.
Though several companies agreed to present at this E3 event, Ferrell discovered that CEA had offered video game companies a dedicated space at the next CES, which would have conflicted with the planned E3 event, requiring the companies to pick one or the other. Most of the IDSA members supported E3, while Nintendo and Microsoft were still supportive of the CES approach. After about three to four months, Ferrell was told by CEA's CEO Gary J. Shapiro that he had "won" and that they had canceled the CES video game event, effectively making E3 the premier trade show for the video game industry.
1995–2006: Growth and success through first decade
The first event was held from May 11–13, 1995 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, which would generally be the convention's location in future years. The organizers were unsure of how successful this would be, but by the end of the convention, they had booked most of the space at the Convention Center, and saw more than 40,000 attendees. In the aftermath of its first year, E3 was already regarded as the biggest event in the video game industry. The IDSA realized the strength of a debut trade show, and subsequently renegotiated with IDG to allow the IDSA to take full ownership of the show and the intellectual property associated with the name, while hiring IDG to help with execution of the event. During this E3, Sega had introduced the Sega Saturn, priced at $399. Sony also introduced the first PlayStation console, with Sony Computer Entertainment North America's president Steve Race coming on stage during their press event to simply say "$299" before leaving the stage to applause. The surprise undercutting price had a significant impact on Sega and the current console war between Sega, Sony, and Nintendo. From then on, E3 was seen to play a major part in other console wars, with journalists reporting on which manufacturer "won" E3 based on their product offerings.In 1996, IDG and the IDSA tried a Japanese version of E3, in preparation for a worldwide series of events, at the Makuhari Messe in Tokyo in association with TV Asahi. Although Sony Computer Entertainment was the show's original sponsor, the company withdrew its support in favor of its PlayStation Expo. Sega then pulled out at the last minute, leaving Nintendo the only big-three company to appear. Held November 1–4, 1996, the presence of several other gaming expos and lack of support from Japanese game manufacturers led to reportedly poor turnout and rumored E3 events in Singapore and Canada did not take place.
Due to failed negotiations for the convention space in Los Angeles, the E3 conventions in 1997 and 1998 were held at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Turnout at these shows was dramatically lower than at the first two E3s, which has been attributed to a declining number of game developers and the fact that many video game companies were based on the West Coast, making the cost of sending staff and equipment to Atlanta prohibitive. The show returned to the Los Angeles Convention Center in 1999, and continued to grow in attendance, ranging from 60,000 to 70,000 attendees.
In addition to the event, E3 started to support several websites. One was E365, introduced in 2006, an online community which attendees used to network and schedule meetings.
2007–2008: ''Media and Business Summit''
Following the 2006 convention, the IDSA—now ESA—found that many exhibitors were worried about the high costs of presenting at the event, spending between for their booths. They had also found that a larger proportion of attendees were bloggers and attendees who were not perceived to be industry professionals by vendors, managing to secure access to the conference. These additional attendees diluted the vendors' ability to reach out to their target audience, retailers and journalists. Both of these reasons had previously caused the COMDEX trade show to shut down. Several large vendors told the ESA that they were going to pull out of the next E3, which would have had a domino effect on other vendors.To avoid this, the ESA announced in July 2006 that E3 would be downsized and restructured due to the overwhelming demand from the exhibitors, and would limit attendees to those from the media and retail sectors. For 2007 and 2008, E3 was renamed to the E3 Media and Business Summit, and moved into the July timeframe, about two months later in the year than previous shows. The 2007 show was held at the Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport and other nearby hotels in Santa Monica, California with attendance limited to about 10,000, and was the last time the show was not physically held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The 2008 event returned to the Los Angeles Convention Center, but also capped attendance at about 5,000.
ESA was harshly criticized for these smaller events. Industry analyst Michael Pachter said that because consumers had been eliminated from attending the events, there was little external media coverage of these E3s, reducing the visibility and commercialization opportunities for publishers, and suggested that without a change, E3 would become extinct. Pachter also found that retailers were less interested in E3 due to the later calendar date. Activision, which had been a member of the ESA since its start, opted to leave the ESA in 2008 and to no longer participate in the E3 event, with their CEO Robert Kotick stating the company was too big for the E3 and ESA at that point, riding on revenue from World of Warcraft.