City Document Reveals E3 2024 And 2025 Have Already Been Canceled

The E3 games showcase seems to be canceled for 2024 and 2025, after facing a similar fate for three editions in the past four years. Industry insider Wario64 tweeted a copy of a meeting announcement from the Los Angeles City Tourism Board of Commissioners, highlighting events for the coming years.

Outlining plans for city-wide convention sales, the document only mentions "E3 cancellations for 2024 and 2025" as a footnote without disclosing the reason. ReedPop, which has lately handled E3 organization duties, hasn't provided any comments yet about tentative plans for its games showcase event within the next couple of years.

However, do keep in mind that the organizers could very well shift the event away from the iconic Los Angeles Convention Center to a different city. But given the track record of how E3 has been given the cold shoulder by the biggest names in the gaming industry, its future seems shaky.

Once regarded as the biggest gaming event in the industry, E3 was first derailed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021 edition was an online-only affair and had Ubisoft, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Square Enix in attendance. But the situation changed dramatically within a year, spurring back-to-back cancellations in 2022 and 2023 as the trend of brand-specific showcase events caught up.

It's no secret that independent showcases by platform leaders and standalone events from big-name studios have stolen the thunder from E3 in recent years. On top of it, Geoff Keighley's own Summer Games Fest show now makes headlines in the same June slot that was once dominated by E3 announcements. 

Opinions, however, differ. "I think E3 sort of killed itself in a way," Keighley said in a podcast interview with VGC earlier this month. For gaming fans and developers, the absence of platform overlords Microsoft and Sony from the E3 slate further reduced the incentive for the event. The recent platform skirmishes over multi-billion acquisitions have only driven the rivals apart.

It's plausible that the big dogs like Xbox and PlayStation might never share the stage again, especially with all the bad blood between Microsoft and Sony over the Activision Blizzard fiasco. Microsoft held its Xbox Games showcase event in June, and followed it up with a show dedicated to a Starfield deep-dive.

On July 11, the company is hosting the next ID@Xbox Showcase to drop trailers and gameplay details about new titles from its stable. Sony and Nintendo held their own stacked events in June, while Keighley had his own gaming event in the same window. This is not to say that E3 is doomed, but the chance for E3 to regain its former glory is likely shrinking.