The ESA has canceled its in-person event for E3 2022, according to a statement shared with IGN by the ESA. But, while they point to upcoming announcements, the future of the show this year and beyond remains unclear.
“Due to the ongoing health risks surrounding COVID-19 and its potential impact on the safety of exhibitors and attendees, E3 will not be held in person in 2022,” reads a statement sent to IGN by the ESA. “We remain incredibly excited about the future of E3 and look forward to announcing more details soon.”
This effectively means that currently, E3 2022’s very existence is uncertain. With no dates set and no physical event planned, that would theoretically leave a possibility for a digital showcase. But in a follow-up communication with IGN, the ESA added that it could not confirm at this time whether or not there would be a digital event this year instead of the physical event, as there was in 2021.
The ESA’s announcement arrives in the middle of an ongoing, deadly, global pandemic that just saw a record number of new cases in the US. When the ESA made its announcement around a physical event last year, vaccinations were still slowly ramping up, and many observers believed that in-person gaming events at a larger scale would resume in 2022. They did, briefly, with a smaller PAX West taking place in the fall and The Game Awards in December happening without incident. But the rise of new coronavirus variants and ongoing concerns about testing availability and mask mandates have made prospects dicier for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, E3’s future has been a question mark for some time now. Its 2022 show never had firm dates set and was never on the official LACC calendar, despite past shows’ physical and digital being scheduled over a year in advance. An in-person E3 2022 had been planned officially since the opening of last year’s show, per a speech from LA mayor Eric Garcetii. But its official Twitter and website have been uncharacteristically silent since then, and multiple sources with ties to E3 speaking to IGN under conditions of anonymity suggested that the ESA had given up on trying to hold a physical show much earlier, possibly as far back as fall of last year. Other industry sources suggested that while they would typically have heard about formal plans for E3 by now — digital or physical — the ESA’s silence on the matter had been deafening, and they are unsure what the plan is at all, if any.
Concerns about the show go beyond just its ability to hold a 2022 showcase, too. In August of 2019, the ESA leaked the private details of over 2000 journalists, YouTubers, and analysts who had attended E3. The following month, a GameDaily.biz report shared a pitch for an overhauled plan for E3 2020 as a “fan, media, and influencer festival” focused around “experience hubs” and featuring “queuetainment,” or marketing targeted toward people stuck waiting in line. Just a few months later, Geoff Keighley announced he would no longer participate in E3 for the first time in 25 years and would not run its E3 Coliseum event. The month after that, Iam8bit resigned as the creative director of E3 2020.
The efforts since haven’t inspired confidence either. The E3 2021 companion app garnered widespread criticism for being both barren and riddled with bugs. The digital event itself was crowded between numerous other similar digital events that publishers put on without the help of the ESA. Many of them had gotten test drives the prior year, when there was no E3 at all, leading former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé to suggest back in February in 2021 that if the ESA wasn’t able to put all the elements together for a successful E3, that gap would be filled some other way — perhaps by Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest, which Keighley just announced will return this year. Multiple others we spoke to echoed that sentiment, with many remarking on the numerous successful digital events that took place without the ESA’s support both in 2020 and 2021.
It currently remains unclear whether E3 in any form will take place in 2022, and if it does, what the show will look like or when it will even be.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
