It appears that E3 has been canceled for the next two years. During a recent meeting for Los Angeles’ Tourism Board, a brief footnote mentions that the annual video game event won’t take place in the city for either 2024 or 2025.
That said, a representative with the ESA (which co-runs the event with ReedPop) told Axios that E3’s future was up in the air. The ESA is “currently in conversation with ESA members and other stakeholders about E3 2024 (and beyond), and no final decisions about the events have been made at this time.”
From the phrasing, it’s possible E3 will be set in another city entirely. In recent years, the one time it was outside of LA was in 2007, where it was held in Santa Monica, California.
E3 has not fully recovered since 2020
Questions about E3’s future have existed since the early days of the pandemic, which saw the event’s first-ever cancellation in 2020. Though it returned virtually the following year, it was canceled again in 2022.
E3 was meant to come back for an in-person event this year, but was ultimately canceled. ReedPop and the ESA chalked it up to many factors, including several big name developers like Sega and Ubisoft dropping out.
In the years since 2020, more developers have been holding their own specialized events. Or failing that, they’ve made their game reveals part of Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest or Game Awards round up.
2023 marks the first full year sans E3. Keighley’s Summer Game Fest still has some growing pains to work out, and time will tell if it will completely override what used to be a staple of the industry.