What simply occurred? The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has been in turmoil ever for the reason that starting of the Covid-19 pandemic. With the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) now telling its companions that this 12 months’s occasion has been canceled, the way forward for the expo seems bleak.
The first report of E3 2022’s cancellation got here in a tweet from Razer PR lead Will Powers, who mentioned he acquired an e mail confirming it. Soon after, the ESA notified Axios’s Stephen Totilo and Variety that it axed this 12 months’s present. The group plans to make use of the additional time to arrange an in-person and digital E3 in the summertime of 2023.
In January, the ESA canceled this 12 months’s in-person occasion because of the emergence of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. Reports additionally prompt {that a} digital-only occasion hadn’t been set in stone. Typically, E3 publicizes the date of subsequent 12 months’s occasion instantly upon the shut of the present 12 months’s expo. However, the ESA by no means revealed a date for E3 2022. The occasion hasn’t been held in individual since 2019. The onset of the pandemic led to the first-ever cancellation of E3 in 2020, and E3 2021 was an online-only occasion.
The official Twitter account of the 2022 Super Game Fest — the same business occasion — tweeted a hyperlink to its web site instantly after Powers’s tweet. The present’s host, Geoff Keighley, reacted with a winking emoji. The web site for this 12 months’s Summer Game Fest went reside in January, at almost the identical time the ESA canceled E3 2022’s in-person occasion.
