The Rise and Fall of E3: Why Games' Biggest Show Died

For almost three decades, one week in Los Angeles decided what the games business talked about all year. Then it stumbled, shrank, went online and quietly died. The story of E3, told through the money that built it and the money that left.

On a stage in Los Angeles in May 1995, a Sony executive named Steve Race walked to the microphone, said three words and walked off. The words were "Two ninety-nine." Sega had just announced its Saturn console at $399. Sony's PlayStation would cost a hundred dollars less, and the crowd knew at once who had won the day.

That moment happened at the very first Electronic Entertainment Expo, and it set the template for everything E3 became: a place where the games business made its biggest bets in public. For almost three decades the show was the industry's annual Super Bowl. Then, on December 12, 2023, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) announced that E3 was over for good.

How does the most important event in an industry simply vanish? The answer is mostly about money, and a little about the internet.

Born out of a leaky tent

Before E3, video games were a guest at other people's parties. Publishers showed their products at the Consumer Electronics Show, squeezed in among car stereos and television sets. Sega's American boss Tom Kalinske later complained that CES had put the games business in a leaking tent in 1991, and Sega stopped going.

The industry decided it needed its own show. The trade body now called the ESA, then the IDSA, teamed up with the media company IDG, and the first E3 ran from May 11 to 13, 1995, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. More than 40,000 people came. Apart from two years in Atlanta in 1997 and 1998, Los Angeles would be E3's home for the rest of its life.

The format was simple. E3 was a trade show: closed to the public, open to retailers, journalists and business partners. Publishers built huge booths, held press conferences and tried to convince store buyers to stock their autumn games. The fans followed it through magazines and, later, websites.

The arms race years

By the mid-2000s, E3 had become an arms race. The show set its attendance record of about 70,000 in 2005. Booths grew into small cities, with stages, stunt performers and loud music. After 2006, exhibitors were reported to spend $5 million to $10 million on a single booth.

The spending made sense while E3 was the only stage that mattered. A strong showing could set the tone for a whole console generation, as Sony learned in 1995. The ESA, for its part, became dependent on the show: as of 2016, E3 revenue made up about 48% of the association's budget.

But the cost was starting to hurt, and in 2007 the ESA tried a radical diet. The show was renamed the E3 Media and Business Summit and moved to Santa Monica, with invitation-only access. Attendance collapsed to about 10,000, and in 2008 to about 5,000, the lowest in its history. Exhibitors complained that they had lost the buzz without saving much money. In 2009 the big show returned to the convention centre. The same year, Activision, then one of the largest publishers in the world, had already left the ESA and E3 in 2008.

The internet slowly changed what E3 was for. Fans no longer waited for magazines; they watched press conferences live and read leaks before the doors opened. In 2017, the ESA finally let the public in, selling 15,000 passes. All of them sold, attendance reached about 68,000, and the halls were badly overcrowded. In 2018 attendance hit about 69,200, the best since 2005, and in 2019, about 66,100.

Those numbers look healthy, but the exhibitor list was shrinking underneath them. The number of exhibitors fell from 293 in 2017 to 209 in 2019, nearly a third gone. And one empty space was impossible to ignore.

Sony walks out

In 2019, Sony skipped E3 for the first time since the show began, the company whose "two ninety-nine" had made E3 famous. Its PlayStation boss Shawn Layden explained that a June show no longer fitted the way retailers bought games or the speed at which news now travelled online. Sony had already started running its own events, including a February gathering for partners called Destination PlayStation.

Sony's absence revealed the deeper problem. A publisher with a strong online audience could hold its own broadcast, on its own schedule, with no booth bill and no competition for attention on the same afternoon. Nintendo had been doing something similar for years with its Nintendo Direct videos. For the biggest companies, E3 had become an expensive way to share a stage with rivals.

Pandemic, cancellation, silence

Then came 2020. The ESA cancelled E3 on March 11, 2020, because of COVID-19, and on April 7 said an online replacement was not feasible either. In 2021 the show ran online from June 12 to 15 and got a mixed reception. The in-person 2022 show was cancelled in January 2022, and in March 2022 the online version went too.

The ESA tried once more. In July 2022 it brought in ReedPop, the organiser of PAX and New York Comic Con, to run a reinvented 2023 show with three business days and two separate fan days. It did not survive contact with the publishers. On March 30, 2023, E3 2023 was cancelled for lack of "sustained interest", after Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Ubisoft, Sega and Tencent all said they would not attend. The 2024 show was cancelled in September 2023, and by then ReedPop was no longer involved.

On December 12, 2023, the ESA made it official. ESA chief Stanley Pierre-Louis later pointed to three causes for the end: the pandemic had disrupted development cycles, the economy had made companies rethink event spending, and marketing had shifted to a mix of in-person and digital. He named the rise of publishers' own showcases as a reason, but not other live events.

What replaced it

The vacuum filled almost instantly. When E3 2020 fell, Geoff Keighley, the producer behind The Game Awards, had already pulled out of the show. He launched Summer Game Fest that spring. By 2025 it was drawing more than 50 million livestreams from the YouTube Theater in Los Angeles, and in 2026 it set a record peak of about 3.8 million concurrent viewers. We look at how that business works in our Summer Game Fest story.

The ESA itself came back in a very different shape. Its new event, iicon (the Interactive Innovation Conference), ran from April 27 to 30, 2026, at the Fontainebleau resort in Las Vegas. It was invite-only, with keynotes and workshops for executives, and companies including Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Take-Two, EA and Ubisoft signed up. It is not an E3 for fans, and was never meant to be.

By the numbers

May 11-13, 1995: first E3, Los Angeles Convention Center
70,000: record attendance, 2005
5,000: lowest attendance, 2008, during the Santa Monica experiment
$5-10 million: reported cost of a big booth after 2006
48%: share of the ESA's budget that came from E3 in 2016
293 to 209: exhibitors, 2017 to 2019
December 12, 2023: E3 officially discontinued

What to watch

E3's story is not just nostalgia. It is a lesson in what happens when the biggest players in an industry no longer need a middleman to reach their audience. The show did not lose its fans; it lost its exhibitors, because they found cheaper ways to get the same attention.

WGC's take: the June showcase season is now a patchwork of Summer Game Fest, Xbox's showcase and company streams, and in some ways it reaches far more people than E3 ever did. What vanished was the shared physical floor where small publishers could stand a few metres from giants. Gamescom in Cologne and Tokyo Game Show still offer that; North America no longer has an equivalent. Watch whether iicon grows a public side, and whether Summer Game Fest's invite-only Play Days slowly turn into the trade show E3 used to be.