Tendo City

And nothing of value was lost.  Well, alright that is a BIT of an exaggeration.  At one point in time, E3 was valuable.  Oh I don't mean just to the industry's big shots but to the humble independent developer.  It originally really was a much smaller affair.  Still industry-wide, yes, but the industry was smaller and a lot of companies were themselves smaller operations with "mere" million sellers.  Someone could reasonably pay a small fee and get a booth to show off some silly game about cats painting fences or something for the Commodore 64.  As time went on, E3 started to become better known to people outside the industry and by the end of the 90's it had really become a U.S. gaming touchstone all on it's own.  At this point just about anyone could simply show up as a guest to play demos.  Laser Link, for example.

But, as the new millennium went on, only three companies and their well-manicured shows came to "matter" at all.  Only the press could attend.  Costs for getting a booth became far greater, and only partly related to this, floor space for anyone who wasn't being directly promoted by Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo was sparse.  While bigger name companies always had a bigger presence at E3, the sheer difference between the top and the bottom became so extreme by this point that independents no longer considered it even worth the cost for the meager exposure they were getting.  Better to woo one of the "big three" to promote them instead and sign some exclusive contracts, or simply go their own way completely.  In the midst of this, the internet's bandwidth and hosting space exploded again and again year after year, and full live streams of E3 became the norm.  What did we get for this?  Rather silly shows full of inside jokes, "half-time" shows, faked trailers, and all the other sort of detritus we all now associate with the event.  It became apparent with Nintendo starting to distance themselves that even the huge corporations no longer really needed what E3 had to offer.  Nintendo's direct streams became so popular that MS and Sony, to varying success, copied the formula themselves.

And then Covid happened.  That is a disease which, you may be surprised, is still ravaging us.  As the tall man says, it's never over... booooooy.  In the wake of this, and a cancelled event that turned into numerous company streams, the question was asked again and again.  What is the modern value?  Well, I'd already made my mind up.  I'd already switched to simply watching or reading much faster synopses of the announcements and had LOONG since grown very annoyed at the presenters and their frustrating sense of humor and insultingly bad sales pitches and jabs at each other.  So, in the face of that, is it any wonder that the industry as a whole (meaning, well, the big three as well as EA and other major publishers) have basically given up on it?  They did give their little statement that it "may return".  That's a nothing phrase that means "we don't care about it any more".

Considering that it had turned into nothing but a monstrosity that really only promoted giant corporations that are fully capable of promoting themselves, we don't need E3 any more.  None of us ever went in person, so what did it matter that it wasn't a physical event?  As far as any of us are concerned, it's been a digital only event our entire lives.  The side gig of promoting indie studios, well, things like Nintendo Direct are still making their partnerships to promote indie content anyway.  I'd be in favor of a new tradeshow that was entirely composed of independent studios WITHOUT any interference from the big shots, but let's face facts, if it existed barely anyone would know about it, and it'd end up getting swallowed up by one of the big shots anyway.  Heck if it ALREADY exists, my ignorance of it kind of goes to prove my point about it being too niche doesn't it?

E3 died a long time ago.  All the big shots did was finally pull the plug.

I definitely think that gamers are losing something with E3 going away.  What's replacing it is basically a version of the press conferences, but more scattered out in time, and smaller-size events such as Geoff Keighley's where some (mostly journalists) can play games as they could before.  It's a thing, but you get less news and info out of this than you do a classic E3 show.  I also miss things like Nintendo's on-floor all day streams that they did in the last few years of E3.  I definitely think that we've lost something without it.  Sure, we still get information, but it's less fun this way...

As for the rest of what you say, I think that E3 and the conferences that precede it always were pretty corporate.  There was a time when lots of small-time developers set up booths, in the first few years of E3, but it didn't take long to be mostly corporate.  For those of us not at the hall, honestly the two felt pretty similar; those smaller companies rarely got much press anyway... but sure, you can say that E3 got less interesting.  The later shows certainly got smaller, I could tell that just by watching coverage online.  But even the last, smaller show still was fun to watch coverage of in a way that Keighley's stuff just is not...

"Fun to watch" really isn't high on my list of criteria for these things, and frankly I haven't found anything about e3 particularly fun to watch in many years.  As you say, the early days are long behind us, and the only real purpose of a show like e3, to me, is in furthering the "trade" as a whole, not just the big names.  With it failing like that, to me, I think it's a good thing it's gone.  Whatever we lost, we lost a long time ago.

The replacements can, hopefully, better serve the trade as a whole.  What we lost, on a grander sense deeper in time, is guilds.  It may be time to bring back such ideas.  Yes of COURSE I'm tying this into social justice stuff.  It's what I "do" now, apparently.

The slow drip of prerecorded corporate videos we're getting this year is so indescribably worse than what we had before, I really miss E3.  The biggest thing we have lost is journalist coverage of titles based on them actually playing them instead of having to rely almost exclusively on those official videos and that's it.  It's much harder to get excited for stuff this way and you get a much worse sense of which games are actually good since nobody outside of the dev teams are playing them yet.