For the first time in 24 years, PlayStation has chosen to skip the Electronic Entertainment Expo, more commonly known as E3. They will not have a conference, nor will their presence be known on the show floor at all. This move is unprecedented because PlayStation has been to 24 straight years of E3 and show floor are the current hardware leaders with a little over 86 million copies of the PS4 being sold. Playstation Senior VIce President of Communications Jennifer Clark has explained this decision on GameInformer.
“As the industry evolves, Sony Interactive Entertainment continues to look for inventive opportunities to engage the community," the company told Game Informer in a statement. "PlayStation fans mean the world to us and we always want to innovate, think differently and experiment with new ways to delight gamers. As a result, we have decided not to participate in E3 in 2019. We are exploring new and familiar ways to engage our community in 2019 and can’t wait to share our plans with you.”
With all of this information, and this statement, here are my thoughts as to why they are doing this.
PlayStation has been showing off three main games for the past few years now that still have not been released, those games being The Last of Us Part II, Death Stranding, and Ghost of Tsushima. They might just be taking a break from E3 to give these games a break from the spotlight. This means, Sony might not be ready to show anything new quite yet, but if they are that is where the next point comes in.
For the past four years, Sony has had an event for the fans called, the PlayStation Experience. Typically this event is on the first weekend of December. However, this year they chose to not have this event due to not repeating the mistake of last year, where they had a more intimate conference during this event. However, this was not well received to past PlayStation Experiences. The reasoning for canceling this event this year might be the same reason for not having an E3 this year.
However, if Sony chooses to announce their next console next year, the PS5 most likely, that could mean that Sony wants their event to announce all of the details on the next console as they had with the announcement of the PS4 in March of 2013. However, this time they might want to have this event closer to E3 to draw more spotlight into this event, even if this type of announcement would not need more spotlight. They could also just skip the summer conference scene altogether and have their PlayStation Experience return next year to announce the PS5. Both of these scenarios would mean the PS5 would be out in 2020, however it would seem. But Sony skipping E3 means bad news for the ones who run the show.
The Entertainment Software Association, the group who runs E3, have now lost a majority of the companies who tended to have their conferences in the Los Angeles Convention Center. EA left to have their conference in Hollywood a few years ago, while Microsoft last year moved across the street to have their conference and their own showfloor. Nintendo over the past few years have conducted pre-recorded videos instead of having their big announcements at E3. However, they still have a presence of showcasing the games on the showfloor, just no announcements at the convention center. Now with Sony skipping next year, this does not bode well for what could come for E3. They have other developers that have conferences in the convention center, but they are all not as big as all of those. The closest to that type of scale would be Bethesda and Ubisoft who both still currently have their conference in E3. But, they both do not compare to the reach of EA and the three console competitors.
With Sony skipping E3, next year is shaping up to be an interesting one already in the world of the video games. Will Sony announce their next console, are they just knowing that showing games too much is an actual issue companies have to think about, or are they just very confident about themselves?
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