EA parting ways with E3

EA will not have a floor presence at E3 and they’re moving their press event to the Sunday before E3 instead of the Monday opening with everyone else.

Instead, EA has announced EA Play. An offsite three-day event. Tickets are free, but limited.

The ESA (E3’s organizers) commented:

EA’s player experience underscores E3 as the global launchpad for video game news, announcements, and excitement. As always, we continue to look forward to their contributions to E3 week and can’t wait to play the games ourselves.

You do you EA.

EA3.

456

I love not having to cover E3 so much. It’s so awesome, you don’t even know.

EA tried to do the same thing in 2007 and rallied others to “end” the E3 after 2006, but it came back after a couple of years. At least this time they aren’t trying to take down the whole ship. That said, I personally have felt little reason to attend the show since it came back, given the availability of so much video coverage. The only E3s I really loved were the ones in Atlanta in 97 & 98, which had a much more intimate vibe and so much more to discover.

Sounds like a reasonable decision by EA and more bang for its buck, really.

Yeah I remember losing the fun E3 before… and we wound up with something that wasn’t interesting or exciting for most people… then it came back.

I guess if they are going to pay $x in marketing, they’d rather spend a little more to be the only fiddle playing a solo, rather than just one in an entire orchestra.

Also they don’t have to pay booth costs, which must be enormous for the likes of EA.

As someone who is always primed to take a dig at EA, I think this is probably a smart move.

Why does anyone care about E3 anymore? What purpose does it really serve? So often people do things ‘because that’s the way everyone is doing it’, and when a company is spending millions that is a poor reasoning. Most announcements are ‘leaked’ in advance of the show anyhow.

I honestly don’t see what benefit companies derive from spending millions at E3 that justifies the price tag. Certainly it seems there should be better ways of spending that money.

Unrelated, but just since we’re talking about EA: Almost every comment on EA’s Instagram is “Skate 4”

I wanted to just reply to this thread with “skate 4”, but if you weren’t aware of the joke I’d hate to get your hopes up that they were actually making that game.

Oh god, the off-year “E3” in Santa Monica bouncing between four different hotels and other venues was so dumb.

It’s like Jordan retiring and then playing a few seasons for the Wizards. Something that wasn’t very good that we all agreed to pretend never happened.

Yeah except last time this happened, they talked about all this saving’s they’d get by not doing booths and no demos or presentations and then whined for a year they didn’t get any hype or excitement because there were no booths, demos, or presentations. It didn’t work.

Last time EA made games that needed hype. Fifa, Madden and Star Wars sell themselves. Battlefield is about the only thing they need to hype. Well, that and Mirrors Edge, but I can’t imagine them devoting much effort to that anyway

This is the part that companies break with E3? I dislike that part. I like wen companies show stuff in e3, even if is a dumb ceremony for clowns.

Well, they’re still going to show stuff. Just not at the convention centre.

I am pretty sure they had a lot of known series back then too, maybe not Star Wars. I don’t know. They can do what they want, but it’s certainly not the first time a company broke with E3… and the last few times that happened, or you know when they tried to make E3 less fun in general, they all wound up going right back to it not long after.

Its functionally the Academy Awards for the game industry. It gives mainstream media a reason to talk about new upcoming games, whereas individual companies, even Activision don’t really have the clout to move the needle in the same way.

Even today, the only other times the media talks about games are during controversy, or for post-release sales records, etc.

I can’t think of any 4 word combination that better describes E3!

-Todd

I think its pretty tacky to take advantage of E3’s location and schedule while avoiding actually patients to participate. That’s some Ouya level dick-wickery.