Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the tech are you? So I read the news today. Oh boy, technically I read it yesterday when all my troubles seemed so far away, But I had already recorded yesterday's tech News episode, so I couldn't include it in that episode. But the news is that E three, also known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is no more. It has ceased to be. It has rung up the curtain and joined the choir invisible as it were, or to be less monty python ish about it. The Entertainment Software Association or ESA has announced that E three will stop trying to make three happened. It's like fetch, It's never happening. E three is over now. Some people would argue that E three had already died years ago, and that in the years following it was just a shambling, zombie husk of what it once was. So today I thought we would do a very short overview of E three, why it was a thing and why it's now no longer a thing, and I have done lots of other episodes about E three, including some deep dives on E three's history, so please check the tech Stuff archives for other E three episodes if you want to learn more. This is more of a high level look at the event and what happened. So here we go. Now. Before E three, which officially began in nineteen ninety five, the video game industry found it difficult to promote itself, and this was for a whole bunch of reasons. So, first of all, back in the nineteen eighties in the United States, there was this massive industry wide video game collapse and it reset home video game entertainment and made a lot of retailers wary of another potential crash. It really set back specifically console games. Here in the US. There was a general point of view among much of the mainstream public that games were for kids and really only for kids, and a lot of people found it beyond belief that an adult would actually like to play video and computer games. This meant that when games began exploring material that wasn't suitable for kids, there was a huge disconnect. You know, people were saying, you can't make a game where one guy rips off his face and breathes fire to torch another guy. These are for kids. That was the sort of thinking that was going on back then. In fact, that problem led to the formation of the Entertainment Software Association itself, the ESA. This is the organization that formally put on E three. Now. At the time, it wasn't called the ESA. It was called the Interactive Digital Software Association or IDSA, but eventually it would change its name. So the game's industry needed to create a review board that could assign maturity ratings to game titles to let people know what ages are appropriate for specific video games. If the industry could prove that it could regulate itself well, that would help prevent the US government from getting involved. So this was really an act of self preservation in the video game industry, and it was all made necessary largely because the US government was mostly comprised of old poops who were totally out of touch with the modern world. Some things never seemed to change. So the Entertainment Software Ratings Board or ESRB became a thing, and the ESA, the organization behind it, was a nonprofit. The ESA also would form working groups to help tackle specific challenges in the home video and computer game spaces, so stuff like intellectual property policies and that kind of thing. E three would end up being the main way that ESA would pay for all this activity. It became a primary revenue generation kind of outlet, but that wasn't the main purpose of E three. So the main purpose outside of funding the ESA was to give video game companies their own trade event where they could speak directly to retailers and distributors and the press. They could promote upcoming titles, they could make announcements, they could provide people the chance to experience early builds of games through demos. This meant that the companies wouldn't have to accept the indignity of going to events like CES only to get pushed out to a leaky ten in a parking lot, because seriously, that's the sort of space these companies would usually get assigned because no one in consumer electronics actually respected the video game industry at the time, so going to a big event like CES, it was hard to get noticed and to stand out among every other company at CES, and at the same time you're in enduring really uncomfortable circumstances, all right, So E three would become part promotional event, part networking opportunity, and part revenue generator for the ESA. And then the ESA could fund stuff like the ESRB and various working groups and keep the entire industry safe from government intervention. So it was a mutually beneficial system for everyone involved. But over time potholes formed in the road for E three. It got pretty wild pretty quickly, and this excess garnered attention. E three started looking less like a professional trade industry event and more like a wild Hollywood party with lots of excess, and so the ESA tried to course correct, but it used way too heavy of a hand. So for a couple of years ethere was much much more subdued, with individual sessions located in different hotels across town, and gone was the party atmosphere, And gone too was a lot of the appeal that brought people an attention to the event in the first place. And so the ESA course corrected again and a bit more party crept back into the event. It wasn't as wild as the earlier days, but it certainly wasn't as buttoned down as the more restrictive years. But then another challenge began to emerge. See some of the bigger companies started to realize that they could hold their own event, and it could be a physical event where people attend in person, such as Blizzard's BlizzCon that started in two thousand and five. That allowed the general public to purchase takes to this event, which really set it apart from E three. E three was still an industry only event, which meant to attend E three you needed to be a game developer, a publisher, a distributor, a retailer, or a journalist. The general public was not allowed inside, although a lot of enterprising young people would launch game focused blogs or websites or such and they would gain access to E three that way. Anyway, blizz Con was an early example of a company decided to strike out and do its own thing and use that as a promotional event for its various products. The Internet also was really changing things up, so in the mid nineteen nineties when E three first launched, the primary media covering video games tended to be magazines, you know, physical paper magazines with names like Nintendo Power or Game Pro or Computer Gaming World. The Internet and the Web were definitely things in the mid nineties. They exist, but they hadn't saturated our world just yet, But by the mid two thousands it became a different story, and upon the rise of the consumer smartphone, things would really change quickly. Folks turned to the Internet more and more for news and entertainment, and this also meant it would become possible for a video game company, particularly the larger ones, to hold their own events digitally online and to control the entire experience. See One of the downsides of E three is that every company there is competing against everyone else for attention. Usually, the big companies would have their own presentations scheduled so that they weren't going up against anyone else at that time. So Sony would have a press conference, then later on Nintendo would have one, then Microsoft, et cetera. Another downside is it was very expensive for these companies to attend E three. They were spending millions of dollars on presentations and booths. That's a lot of money. Yet another is that E three happened on its own schedule, regardless of how far along a company might be in development of their next game. So imagine that you are in charge of running a video game company and E three is coming up, So you've got a new title that's in development, but it's so early in the development phase that it hasn't really coalesced into something that you can talk about easily. So do you go to E three with nothing new to show and just rely on older titles that have already been released to kind of carry you through? Do you not go and you're not part of the conversation at all. Do you make a guess as to where your barely formed game is heading and then mock up something to show folks, And then what happens if development takes a different turn and the game you produce ends up being significantly different from the preview you showed. It was a real problem. Holding your own event would give you far more control, and you'd have the spotlight all to yourself, and you wouldn't have to worry about whether or not you quote unquote one E three. So the transition of companies leaving E three didn't happen all at once, but there were signs as early as twenty eleven. That's where we'll pick up after we take this quick break. So before the break, I mentioned that in twenty eleven things began to change. That's when Nintendo held its first Nintendo Direct Video News Conference, and in twenty thirteen, Electronic Arts and Nintendo both chose to forego a live stage keynote presentation, instead opting to hold their own digital showcases around the same time as the E three event. They did still maintain a presence on the exhibition floor, so they still had booths and stuff on the floor, but they didn't do a big stage keynote, they didn't do a live presentation in front of a live audience. Electronic Arts would further distance itself from E three and twenty sixteen, and then Sony and Microsoft began to hold their own events in order to unveil hardware. They would just use E three to kind of announce software. But then Sony announced in twenty eighteen that it was not going to come back for E three twenty nineteen or twenty twenty. In fact, nobody went to E three twenty twenty because Covid took care of that. Sony has been out of E three ever since. Nintendo and Microsoft would announce earlier this year, back in January in fact, that they were not going to go to E three twenty twenty three, and again nobody would end up going to E three twenty twenty three, because the ESA chose to cancel the event because frankly, hardly anyone was agreeing to show up to it. In fact, since twenty nineteen, E three has only happened once, and that was a digital only event in twenty twenty one, twenty two to twenty twenty three. All of those events were canceled. Other things contributed to E three's decline. For example, in twenty seventeen, the ESA chose to open the event up to the public on a limited basis. They offered tickets for sale for the public to attend E three, and a lot of the industry folks found this really frustrating, particularly the journalists, at least in my experience, because those were the people I was hanging out with. And that was because getting around E three and doing your job got a whole lot harder when the general public was taking up space. But the ESA was in a losing battle. E three was becoming less relevant as more companies drifted away and started to hold their own events. Now that's not to say that everyone found E three to be irrelevant. A lot of independent game developers used E three to connect with media and with fans, and for a while retailers. But that does bring us to another thing that has changed dramatically since the founding of E three. So back in the mid nineties, if you wanted to buy a new computer or video game, then you, as a consumer had to go to a store, probably a toy store or maybe a big like electronics box store. You'd peruse the aisles and you would look for the title you wanted and you would hope it was in stock. But these days, with digital distribution, buying a physical copy of a game is far less common outside of cartridge based systems. That change meant that the role of distributors and retailers pretty much disappeared, so a big chunk of E three's reason for being also went away. Meanwhile, you had folks like Jeff Keeley, who once upon a time played a very important part in E three, but then would go on to launch their own events that would compete largely in the same space. Keighley's Summer Game Fest has become an alternative platform where developers can announce upcoming titles to drum up excitement, and then the game Awards would also become a place to promote upcoming games. Also, you know you could hand out awards and stuff, but if you saw this year's Game Awards, you know there was way more focus on video game trailers and celebrity appearances than on the actual awards and recipients. That might be a little commentary from my point of view. Anyway, you could argue that E three's relevance really faded away a few years back. Actually, since only one event and a digital only version of E three has happened since twenty nineteen, I don't think it's even arguable. I think it's obvious E three was no longer relevant. Now. That's not necessarily a bad thing, at least not for the individual companies involved. It can be bad for some of the independent companies. It decreases the opportunities they have to get in front of people. It can be really challenging for an independent, a small independent developer to get that kind of attention. Sometimes, however, it can partner with a larger company like a Microsoft or a Sony and become part of a showcase for one of their events, but it's still challenge. For the ESA, the loss of E three could be a real headache because now the organization will need to determine how to manage funds to still fulfill its other functions. Like E three was probably the most visible thing that the ESA did, but that ESRB, that's still a thing that goes on, and there are still these issues of the working groups that try to help forge the video game industry stance on important issues, so that's still a challenge. I didn't even touch on some of the scandals around the ESA itself because it's not like it is immune to well to scandal. There are lots of them, in fact, including the time that the ESA accidentally docsed hundreds of video game professionals, particularly journalists. Yikes. In an era where there have been death threats made against game developers and journalists from extremes, I guess I should say it's bad to have all your personal information revealed online, And yeah, the ESA did that. It was a whole thing. Anyway, after years of asking the question, is E three dead, we can now say definitively yes, it is really most sincerely dead. Does that mean it will never come back? Never say never. I mean maybe sometime in the future someone will resurrect the E three brand. I mean, people do love nostalgia, after all, Whether it's the ESA or maybe some other entity that purchases the rights to the E three name. Maybe that will happen, But the original intent of E three isn't really a thing anymore. Right. We don't have the barriers to promote oneself that existed back in the nineteen nineties. We don't have the retail and distribution channels that we had back in the nineteen ninety so a lot of the stuff that E three was trying to address no longer is an issue. It's moot. So I don't think we're gonna get an E three, at least not the way we had in the past. Maybe we get some sort of larger public facing event that's run by a different organization, but I don't know. Anyway, you could say that it really stuck around longer than was necessary, but still farewell E three, Fair winds and following seas. I only attended E three maybe three times total since since I started working this job back in two thousand and seven, so I am by no means a veteran of E three, like I've only been a few times. But I can say like there was some stuff that happened to E three, like some of those presentations. They were so wack adoodle weird that I do. I am sorry that they're gone, because I mean, it was real spectacle. I will I don't. I don't know that it was always effective in promoting a company or its video games, but it was always worth talking about, not necessarily in a positive way. But yeah, I kind of miss that that's no longer a thing. I mean, you can still sometimes see that in these individual companies events online, but it's not quite the same because they're not trying to outdo each other in the same space, so that takes a big part of it out. Anyway, that's the update on E three. As I said, you can go back into the tech Stuff archives. There are lots of episodes about E three. They go into much greater detail and talk about the various changes that happened over the course of its existence. But yeah, it's it's sad to say goodbye, but I think it was pastime. I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, app podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the tech are you? So I read the news today. Oh boy, technically I read it yesterday when all my troubles seemed so far away, But I had already recorded yesterday's tech News episode, so I couldn't include it in that episode. But the news is that E three, also known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is no more. It has ceased to be. It has rung up the curtain and joined the choir invisible as it were, or to be less monty python ish about it. The Entertainment Software Association or ESA has announced that E three will stop trying to make three happened. It's like fetch, It's never happening. E three is over now. Some people would argue that E three had already died years ago, and that in the years following it was just a shambling, zombie husk of what it once was. So today I thought we would do a very short overview of E three, why it was a thing and why it's now no longer a thing, and I have done lots of other episodes about E three, including some deep dives on E three's history, so please check the tech Stuff archives for other E three episodes if you want to learn more. This is more of a high level look at the event and what happened. So here we go. Now. Before E three, which officially began in nineteen ninety five, the video game industry found it difficult to promote itself, and this was for a whole bunch of reasons. So, first of all, back in the nineteen eighties in the United States, there was this massive industry wide video game collapse and it reset home video game entertainment and made a lot of retailers wary of another potential crash. It really set back specifically console games. Here in the US. There was a general point of view among much of the mainstream public that games were for kids and really only for kids, and a lot of people found it beyond belief that an adult would actually like to play video and computer games. This meant that when games began exploring material that wasn't suitable for kids, there was a huge disconnect. You know, people were saying, you can't make a game where one guy rips off his face and breathes fire to torch another guy. These are for kids. That was the sort of thinking that was going on back then. In fact, that problem led to the formation of the Entertainment Software Association itself, the ESA. This is the organization that formally put on E three. Now. At the time, it wasn't called the ESA. It was called the Interactive Digital Software Association or IDSA, but eventually it would change its name. So the game's industry needed to create a review board that could assign maturity ratings to game titles to let people know what ages are appropriate for specific video games. If the industry could prove that it could regulate itself well, that would help prevent the US government from getting involved. So this was really an act of self preservation in the video game industry, and it was all made necessary largely because the US government was mostly comprised of old poops who were totally out of touch with the modern world. Some things never seemed to change. So the Entertainment Software Ratings Board or ESRB became a thing, and the ESA, the organization behind it, was a nonprofit. The ESA also would form working groups to help tackle specific challenges in the home video and computer game spaces, so stuff like intellectual property policies and that kind of thing. E three would end up being the main way that ESA would pay for all this activity. It became a primary revenue generation kind of outlet, but that wasn't the main purpose of E three. So the main purpose outside of funding the ESA was to give video game companies their own trade event where they could speak directly to retailers and distributors and the press. They could promote upcoming titles, they could make announcements, they could provide people the chance to experience early builds of games through demos. This meant that the companies wouldn't have to accept the indignity of going to events like CES only to get pushed out to a leaky ten in a parking lot, because seriously, that's the sort of space these companies would usually get assigned because no one in consumer electronics actually respected the video game industry at the time, so going to a big event like CES, it was hard to get noticed and to stand out among every other company at CES, and at the same time you're in enduring really uncomfortable circumstances, all right, So E three would become part promotional event, part networking opportunity, and part revenue generator for the ESA. And then the ESA could fund stuff like the ESRB and various working groups and keep the entire industry safe from government intervention. So it was a mutually beneficial system for everyone involved. But over time potholes formed in the road for E three. It got pretty wild pretty quickly, and this excess garnered attention. E three started looking less like a professional trade industry event and more like a wild Hollywood party with lots of excess, and so the ESA tried to course correct, but it used way too heavy of a hand. So for a couple of years ethere was much much more subdued, with individual sessions located in different hotels across town, and gone was the party atmosphere, And gone too was a lot of the appeal that brought people an attention to the event in the first place. And so the ESA course corrected again and a bit more party crept back into the event. It wasn't as wild as the earlier days, but it certainly wasn't as buttoned down as the more restrictive years. But then another challenge began to emerge. See some of the bigger companies started to realize that they could hold their own event, and it could be a physical event where people attend in person, such as Blizzard's BlizzCon that started in two thousand and five. That allowed the general public to purchase takes to this event, which really set it apart from E three. E three was still an industry only event, which meant to attend E three you needed to be a game developer, a publisher, a distributor, a retailer, or a journalist. The general public was not allowed inside, although a lot of enterprising young people would launch game focused blogs or websites or such and they would gain access to E three that way. Anyway, blizz Con was an early example of a company decided to strike out and do its own thing and use that as a promotional event for its various products. The Internet also was really changing things up, so in the mid nineteen nineties when E three first launched, the primary media covering video games tended to be magazines, you know, physical paper magazines with names like Nintendo Power or Game Pro or Computer Gaming World. The Internet and the Web were definitely things in the mid nineties. They exist, but they hadn't saturated our world just yet, But by the mid two thousands it became a different story, and upon the rise of the consumer smartphone, things would really change quickly. Folks turned to the Internet more and more for news and entertainment, and this also meant it would become possible for a video game company, particularly the larger ones, to hold their own events digitally online and to control the entire experience. See One of the downsides of E three is that every company there is competing against everyone else for attention. Usually, the big companies would have their own presentations scheduled so that they weren't going up against anyone else at that time. So Sony would have a press conference, then later on Nintendo would have one, then Microsoft, et cetera. Another downside is it was very expensive for these companies to attend E three. They were spending millions of dollars on presentations and booths. That's a lot of money. Yet another is that E three happened on its own schedule, regardless of how far along a company might be in development of their next game. So imagine that you are in charge of running a video game company and E three is coming up, So you've got a new title that's in development, but it's so early in the development phase that it hasn't really coalesced into something that you can talk about easily. So do you go to E three with nothing new to show and just rely on older titles that have already been released to kind of carry you through? Do you not go and you're not part of the conversation at all. Do you make a guess as to where your barely formed game is heading and then mock up something to show folks, And then what happens if development takes a different turn and the game you produce ends up being significantly different from the preview you showed. It was a real problem. Holding your own event would give you far more control, and you'd have the spotlight all to yourself, and you wouldn't have to worry about whether or not you quote unquote one E three. So the transition of companies leaving E three didn't happen all at once, but there were signs as early as twenty eleven. That's where we'll pick up after we take this quick break. So before the break, I mentioned that in twenty eleven things began to change. That's when Nintendo held its first Nintendo Direct Video News Conference, and in twenty thirteen, Electronic Arts and Nintendo both chose to forego a live stage keynote presentation, instead opting to hold their own digital showcases around the same time as the E three event. They did still maintain a presence on the exhibition floor, so they still had booths and stuff on the floor, but they didn't do a big stage keynote, they didn't do a live presentation in front of a live audience. Electronic Arts would further distance itself from E three and twenty sixteen, and then Sony and Microsoft began to hold their own events in order to unveil hardware. They would just use E three to kind of announce software. But then Sony announced in twenty eighteen that it was not going to come back for E three twenty nineteen or twenty twenty. In fact, nobody went to E three twenty twenty because Covid took care of that. Sony has been out of E three ever since. Nintendo and Microsoft would announce earlier this year, back in January in fact, that they were not going to go to E three twenty twenty three, and again nobody would end up going to E three twenty twenty three, because the ESA chose to cancel the event because frankly, hardly anyone was agreeing to show up to it. In fact, since twenty nineteen, E three has only happened once, and that was a digital only event in twenty twenty one, twenty two to twenty twenty three. All of those events were canceled. Other things contributed to E three's decline. For example, in twenty seventeen, the ESA chose to open the event up to the public on a limited basis. They offered tickets for sale for the public to attend E three, and a lot of the industry folks found this really frustrating, particularly the journalists, at least in my experience, because those were the people I was hanging out with. And that was because getting around E three and doing your job got a whole lot harder when the general public was taking up space. But the ESA was in a losing battle. E three was becoming less relevant as more companies drifted away and started to hold their own events. Now that's not to say that everyone found E three to be irrelevant. A lot of independent game developers used E three to connect with media and with fans, and for a while retailers. But that does bring us to another thing that has changed dramatically since the founding of E three. So back in the mid nineties, if you wanted to buy a new computer or video game, then you, as a consumer had to go to a store, probably a toy store or maybe a big like electronics box store. You'd peruse the aisles and you would look for the title you wanted and you would hope it was in stock. But these days, with digital distribution, buying a physical copy of a game is far less common outside of cartridge based systems. That change meant that the role of distributors and retailers pretty much disappeared, so a big chunk of E three's reason for being also went away. Meanwhile, you had folks like Jeff Keeley, who once upon a time played a very important part in E three, but then would go on to launch their own events that would compete largely in the same space. Keighley's Summer Game Fest has become an alternative platform where developers can announce upcoming titles to drum up excitement, and then the game Awards would also become a place to promote upcoming games. Also, you know you could hand out awards and stuff, but if you saw this year's Game Awards, you know there was way more focus on video game trailers and celebrity appearances than on the actual awards and recipients. That might be a little commentary from my point of view. Anyway, you could argue that E three's relevance really faded away a few years back. Actually, since only one event and a digital only version of E three has happened since twenty nineteen, I don't think it's even arguable. I think it's obvious E three was no longer relevant. Now. That's not necessarily a bad thing, at least not for the individual companies involved. It can be bad for some of the independent companies. It decreases the opportunities they have to get in front of people. It can be really challenging for an independent, a small independent developer to get that kind of attention. Sometimes, however, it can partner with a larger company like a Microsoft or a Sony and become part of a showcase for one of their events, but it's still challenge. For the ESA, the loss of E three could be a real headache because now the organization will need to determine how to manage funds to still fulfill its other functions. Like E three was probably the most visible thing that the ESA did, but that ESRB, that's still a thing that goes on, and there are still these issues of the working groups that try to help forge the video game industry stance on important issues, so that's still a challenge. I didn't even touch on some of the scandals around the ESA itself because it's not like it is immune to well to scandal. There are lots of them, in fact, including the time that the ESA accidentally docsed hundreds of video game professionals, particularly journalists. Yikes. In an era where there have been death threats made against game developers and journalists from extremes, I guess I should say it's bad to have all your personal information revealed online, And yeah, the ESA did that. It was a whole thing. Anyway, after years of asking the question, is E three dead, we can now say definitively yes, it is really most sincerely dead. Does that mean it will never come back? Never say never. I mean maybe sometime in the future someone will resurrect the E three brand. I mean, people do love nostalgia, after all, Whether it's the ESA or maybe some other entity that purchases the rights to the E three name. Maybe that will happen, But the original intent of E three isn't really a thing anymore. Right. We don't have the barriers to promote oneself that existed back in the nineteen nineties. We don't have the retail and distribution channels that we had back in the nineteen ninety so a lot of the stuff that E three was trying to address no longer is an issue. It's moot. So I don't think we're gonna get an E three, at least not the way we had in the past. Maybe we get some sort of larger public facing event that's run by a different organization, but I don't know. Anyway, you could say that it really stuck around longer than was necessary, but still farewell E three, Fair winds and following seas. I only attended E three maybe three times total since since I started working this job back in two thousand and seven, so I am by no means a veteran of E three, like I've only been a few times. But I can say like there was some stuff that happened to E three, like some of those presentations. They were so wack adoodle weird that I do. I am sorry that they're gone, because I mean, it was real spectacle. I will I don't. I don't know that it was always effective in promoting a company or its video games, but it was always worth talking about, not necessarily in a positive way. But yeah, I kind of miss that that's no longer a thing. I mean, you can still sometimes see that in these individual companies events online, but it's not quite the same because they're not trying to outdo each other in the same space, so that takes a big part of it out. Anyway, that's the update on E three. As I said, you can go back into the tech Stuff archives. There are lots of episodes about E three. They go into much greater detail and talk about the various changes that happened over the course of its existence. But yeah, it's it's sad to say goodbye, but I think it was pastime. I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, app podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.