Surprising to No One
COVID-19 and our-inability-to-contain-it strikes again! We all kind of knew it was going to happen, but an in-person event at E3 is officially cancelled. As with pretty much all the annual events in the game industry, it was expected that E3 2021 would be prepared as a digital event. While this information does not come from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), who organizes E3, it does come from the Board of Los Angeles Department of Convention and Tourism Development Commissioners. Basically, if you want to organize a large event in LA, you go through them.
There is a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a BLADCTDC meeting this week. It lays out a lot of boring stuff like revenue from events, trends in hotel occupancy, budget and profit breakdowns, etc.. It also lists upcoming events for the board to discuss and the plans for them to move forward. As you can imagine, in this era of COVID-19, there are a few cancellations. One of those is the live, in-person portion of E3 2021. There are plans to license the event for 2022 and 2023, but for this year, they are only planning a digital broadcast.
Another item of interest you may be looking at is Anime Expo-2021, which will also be doing a virtual show over the 4th of July weekend. E3 2021 is still planned for the dates between June 15th and 17th, but obviously they will be online only.
Do you predict an in-person E3 2022? Let us know in the comments below.