After the postponement of Zelda Breath of the Wild 2, it’s the second time this week that well-informed gamers have had to feign surprise, with all form of E3 officially canceled this year. The ESA has indeed let the press know that it will refocus in 2022 and therefore avoid wasting resources in an edition which, one imagines, was to lack relevance..
A cancellation anticipated for a while
This announcement materializes something that had already been anticipated for weeks, even months: if you diligently follow the news of video games and its events, you should not have fallen out of your chair when you heard of this cancellation. The COVID-19 crisis accelerated things and although the traditional format of conferences at the Los Angeles Convention Center still had adherentsit must be admitted that the classic formula of the E3 made less and less sense, given the evolution of the market.
At an age when publishers prefer to go directly through their own channels, with dedicated lives allowing them to showcase their catalog, the concentration of all the conferences over 3 days during an event mixing a lot of people is not necessarily very relevant today. However, the ESA does not intend to let the show disappear, since according to an official press release sent to IGNthis year’s cancellation will serve to better focus resources on an E3-worthy live event scheduled for 2023.
And now ?
Well now Geoff Keighley has free rein to take the place of the big summer digital event, by centralizing the lives of his fellow publishers all over the summer in his famous Summer Games Fest. For the moment, we cannot honestly say that the hype-o-meter (the only valid metric for this kind ofevent with high promotional content) has exploded during the two editions we have already been able to attend. As for the Game Awards, everything is in the rhythm and the din of the announcements but, we come back to it, how to be relevant when Sony or Nintendo can tell their entire community to be there at such and such a time almost anytime? We will see this summer if GK and his team have a valid response to make, since he announced, in the wake of the ESA press release, that the Summer Games Fest would indeed take place.
playstation
Thing promised, thing due: the new PS Plus has finally been unveiled by Sony Playstation on this sunny afternoon. Between the different offers, the price of new subscriptions and all that entails, discover our complete recap of the announcement.