Before I go into my reasons why it is absolutely ridiculous that the in-person aspect for E3 has been canceled, I just want to throw some cautionary information first. I understand that we had a virtual E3 event in both 2020 and 2021, while COVID was avid, and they are closing it this year because of the latest Omicron strain bringing the outbreak records back up. I’m not here to argue numbers on that nor go over the vaccinated verse unvaccinated percentages when it comes to who is catching it. My problem here isn’t that it doesn’t make sense to make this call, it’s that they could easily have made it happen with proper precautions.
Here we are in the year 2022 and COVID is still a threat to society. Yet sporting events have opened back up and tens of thousands of fans pile into the stands to watch what they could easily see on TV, concert and rave events are taking place where people gather together to dance, jump, mosh, and the like, movie theaters have opened back up and are even having films released “only in theaters” making the HBO Max accounts less valuable, and I could go on with more examples. So much of society has opened back up to the public with a promise to follow guidelines that are barely even suggested to visitors to actually follow.
If all of these events can be open and so many people in the world are going about their day like COVID isn’t a threat anymore, why can’t we have E3? In 2017, they decided to make E3 a public event and allow more than just the media members to go, but they could revoke that decision. In fact, they could have held an in-person E3 with limited media teams, limited people per meeting, offer fewer handouts, more sanitizer, require masks at all times, and require all those who attend to have a vaccine card with the latest booster shot applied. These are standard practices for an indoor event that would make it viable to happen.
E3 was a wonderful time of year for the game industry, even when its doors weren’t open to the public. It was still a better way to get news as our favorite news sources were having actual discussions and interviews with the developers, allowing for the news coverage to have unique details for the games we are all getting hyped for in the summer. These virtual-only events just simply don’t do justice and the only things we are getting these days, aside from straight news, are misleading rumor pieces and self-interviews that developers hold themselves. It is starting to feel more and more disingenuous.
It is absolutely ridiculous for in-person E3 to have been completely canceled when there were so many options they had available to make it happen safely. Limit media teams to five-person teams max, require masks, limit persons allowed per meeting with developers, and place sanitizer all around. Guess I’ll just have to look forward to E3 being in-person in 2023.
