AggroCast Resurrected — E3’s Cancelation [Episode Six‪]‬ AggroCast

The AggroCast crew has some words to say about the cancelation of E3 in 2023 in the latest episode of the podcast. Okay, it is more David has a lot of words to say about the E3 cancelation. Partially as the long-term journalist going to the convention for over a decade. Partially since Ray was a bit under the weather during the recording but was still a superstar to press on through.

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It's alive…
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It's alive…!

AggroCast RESURRECTED!!!

Raymond Bruels: Hi! Welcome to the AggroCast. This is Ray Bruels with David Hades Becker. Today we're going to talk about E3. Or, more importantly, the cancellation of E3 in 2023. So, David, what the hell happened?

David Hades Becker: There's a lot that's happened, and there's a lot that still hasn't come about because they put out the official statement canceling it. There's rumors going about. If you read some of the signs that are out there, you can kind of piece things together. but what it feels like is there was so much backlash for E3 for the longest time mixed in with the pandemic that other organizations and all that stuff kind of feel like they're moving in to do their own thing and... Here I am I'm rambling there it feels like there's a progression that most people didn't see or saw coming and now some of those companies are finally taking advantage of it to do their own thing and by that I mean we have to go back a few years with some of the drama that's happened with E3 in the past... because when I started going E3, every publisher, developer, hardware and creator would show up and they would have a place on the floor or they'd have a meeting room for everybody to get together and actually talk about games, look at games, play the games, all that kind of thing. And then slowly over time, because of the internet and technology, it became easier for them to stream stuff. So like EA, EA was one of them, Ubisoft did the same thing where they would host their own streams, but they would still be on the show floor until it was cheaper to just do the stream and not have these big booth spaces. And that's kind of where it all started. Even though you still have like, you had Sony showing up, Nintendo showing up, Microsoft showing up, and they would do these huge booths, as well as these massive showcases, so that people see the games and everybody that wasn't actually able to on the show floor could see the games. But if you're on the show floor, you can actually play some of them. And it just feels like the shift right now is it's just deeper into stream stuff, as well as allows them to dictate their narrative that want to sell it at all. I think that's the bigger one I kind of want to dive in on.

RB: Yeah, I wondered with some of the changes, especially after COVID and the lockdowns and how everything was kind of put on hiatus, if some of this was because of that and companies recognizing that they didn't need conventions to get their message out, to get their advertising out and so they've shifted to a more online platform.

DHB: Well in some instances it makes sense for it because I remember the last in-person E3 I went to they were still showing off Psychonauts 2 and I remember having a special press access and all they did was they took me into a special room that was done up in a theme, they gave me a little press swag bag and all they did was show me video that they could have just uploaded to YouTube so I could have watched. The only difference was I was in this room that they kind of built an experience around. I was still just watching gameplay that ended up getting uploaded to YouTube a day or two later. So I mean, I get like for companies like that. I mean, at the time, I can't remember the name of the studio, Double Fine. They were a smaller studio, they hadn't been bought by Microsoft yet. So it made it would have made sense for them to save their money and do that. Whereas like, there was one year I