ESA Head Blames E3 Cancellation on Wider Industry Challenges, Won’t Say If Event Will Return

Following IGN’s report earlier today that E3 has officially been canceled, GamesIndustry.biz has published an interview with ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis in which he was asked about what went wrong with the show and whether or not the show would return in the future — though Pierre-Louis was fairly tight-lipped about the answers to these questions.

When asked what went wrong with the show this year, Pierre-Louis pointed to larger industry challenges that proved “too large to surmount.”

“First, several companies have reported that the timeline for game development has been altered since the start of the COVID pandemic. Second, economic headwinds have caused several companies to reassess how they invest in large marketing events. And third, companies are starting to experiment with how to find the right balance between in-person events and digital marketing opportunities.”

Later in the interview, Pierre-Louis was asked if ESA members were no longer interested in the event, what E3 would look like if it continued, if E3 needed the three big platform holders to have any chance of success, and if E3 would return in 2024. Pierre-Louis did not provide any direct answers to any of these questions, though he did seem to deny that communication was an issue in setting up E3 2023 (something IGN’s sources have said was a recurring problem). He directly confirmed that the cancellation of E3 would not impact the ESA’s advocacy work for the games industry.

The ESA announced E3 2023’s cancellation to its members earlier today, stating in an email that the 2023 version of the event “simply did not garner the sustained interest necessary to execute it in a way that would showcase the size, strength, and impact of our industry,” though it did not mention whether or not the event would return. A press release sent to media following our report said that ReedPop and the ESA would continue to work together on “future E3 events.”

This is the latest in a string of cancellations of what was once the largest event in gaming, following the 2020 cancellation during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and another cancellation in 2022 — broken up by a quieter digital event in 2021.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.