By Nelson Schneider - 06/15/25 at 03:04 PM CT
It always used to be that around this time of year, E3 – the Electronic Entertainment Exposition – would dump an incredible amount of info about upcoming releases into the Games Journalism pipeline, drowning the public in cinematic trailers and giving special access to playable demos to trusted members of the press. Sadly, we don’t have much of any of that anymore – as neither E3 nor trusted members of the press exist in 2025.
This is the second year of E3’s official death, after two additional years of “temporary” cancellations and postponements, with promises of returning, “better than ever.” Originally created by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) as a trade show, E3 quickly became the pivot point upon which print journalism magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly balanced an entire year’s worth of coverage. When E3 was at its best, we saw the big platform holders competing for Gamers’ attention in a fierce marketplace of ideas, where dumb mistakes would haunt the corporate bureaucrats who pushed them for years or decades, while perfectly executed presentations would drive hype and make successes based on nothing but promises.
But like so many things, COVID-19 ultimately killed E3, as the big corporate players who would have normally been forced to compete with each other for attention and journalism coverage discovered that they could simply bypass the media to target their existing audiences with direct-to-streaming presentations. With no competition, these direct-formatted presentations became increasingly long, self-indulgent, and tiresome to watch, escalating a trend that was already becoming a problem under the old E3 format.
What’s worse still is that out of the three platforms with direct-format shows this June – The PC Gaming Show, PlayStation State of Play, and Xbox Showcase (Nintendo still hasn’t dropped anything new post-Switch 2) – two of them are 2-hours-long-plus. That is WAY too many hours altogether to sit and watch crappy trailers for crappy games, maybe with some sort of hammy comedy act connecting everything (looking at you, PC Gaming Show).
If the big players in Industrial Gaming want to keep generating hype, they need to get their act together again and at least pretend they want to compete with each other for a critical mass of attention. If they don’t give new generations of Gamers a reason to keep an eye on the Industry and care about upcoming releases, entropy and apathy will creep in, allowing Mobile Gaming to eat up an even larger percentage of overall gaming revenue than they already do.
Allowing E3 to die marked the Industry’s official giving up on Gen-X Gamers as a demographic as well as the economic ideals Gen-X was steeped in. Please look forward to the increasing enshittification of every aspect of gaming moving forward. *bows*
