E3 is dead. DEAD!

[A Black Falcon]

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...