E3 2024 and 2025 have also been canceled

Terrible news for fans who were holding their breath hoping for E3 to return: the events for 2024 and 2025 have been canceled, as shared by the Los Angeles City Tourism Board of Commissioners. This means that the next few E3 conventions are no longer set to happen in the California city, leaving its future a complete mystery.

The news was spotted by ResetEra, revealing that in June 21, 2023, during one of the Board’s regular meetings about tourism-related topics for the city and the county, the materials of the meeting stated that E3 2024 and E3 2025 would no longer take place as expected.

Up until now the next two years of E3 had not been canceled, with their slots in the convention center still being held in case of its eventual return. However the ESA has not been exactly forthcoming about the status of the event or its future. CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis refused to confirm anything about a potential E3 2024, instead saying that they would “have more news to share” in the future.

According to Axios reporter Stephen Totilo, the ESA “is currently in conversation with ESA members and other stakeholders about E3 2024 (and beyond), and no final decisions about the events have been made at this time.”

An ever shifting industry

ReedPop was chosen as the new organizer of the event and has been working on its return since the announcement last year. E3 2023 was set to take place from June 13-16 in the Los Angeles Convention Center, marking its return to a physical format that attempted to accommodate the public, press, and members of the videogame industry all at once in the same place. In previous years it had been considered one of the most important seasons of the year for the industry, with almost every major publisher making appearances and announcing new games to be released in the months after the event. However, E3 lost some relevance in the past decade, and eventually, Sony announced they wouldn’t attend the show again.

The last in-person E3 event took place in 2019, and every other edition of the expo was canceled for safety and health reasons during the COVID-19 pandemic, or for different reasons altogether once it changed to a digital format.

Sources | ResetEra, IGN