Four years ago, when the videogame industry gathered in Los Angeles for the Electronic Entertainment Expo of 2015, many felt as if change was in the air. It was the first E3 since Gamergate had become a household term, so industry insiders and observers alike watched the annual event closely to see how the heated conflict over the place women occupied in gaming culture would be reflected in the games that powerhouses like Sony and Microsoft brought to the show.

If you do an online search for "E3 2015 women" today, what you'll find is that many did feel that year's expo represented a kind of turning point. News stories celebrated women taking on "stronger roles" in videogames and heralded "the rise" of women gamers. Microsoft's press conference that year featured a game called ReCore, starring a woman named Joule who explores a desolate world accompanied by a trio of mechanical companions. The spry swordfighter Emily Kaldwin appeared as a playable character in the stealth action sequel Dishonored 2. EA revealed that women's teams would finally be playable in the next entry in their annual FIFA soccer series. Sony showed off Aloy, the formidable huntress star of Horizon: Zero Dawn. And gang leader Evie Frye shared top billing with her twin brother Jacob in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate.

We at Feminist Frequency wanted to see if this handful of high-profile female heroes actually represented a statistically significant shift, or if those of us starving for more and better representation were just seeing what we wanted to see. So we ran the numbers. Looking at every game featured at every major E3 press conference for that year, we found that out of the 76 games featured, only a paltry seven of them centered female heroes—less than 10 percent. Meanwhile, more than three times as many games, over 30 percent of the total, centered male heroes.

Of course, game development takes time. Most of the games revealed at E3 2015 had probably been in development for a year or two at least—and had certainly been in the works prior to the explosion of Gamergate—and one can't expect an industry as massive as videogames to turn on a dime. So we kept watching, kept doing statistical analysis on the games presented at each E3, to see if things would change. Now, having crunched the numbers for our fifth E3, we can say it: They haven't. This year, the number of games that center women came in at just 5 percent—up from a low point of just 3 percent (two games!) in 2016 and below the high point of 9 percent in 2015.

Anita Sarkeesian and Carolyn Petit are the executive director and managing editor of Feminist Frequency

Now, E3 in 2019 isn't quite what E3 was in 2015. The show's relevance is slowly waning as some studios and developers rely less on big annual press conferences and more on Twitch streams or internally produced YouTube videos to reach fans. Significantly, Sony took a pass on this year's event, though it made a huge splash just a few weeks ago with a gameplay reveal for the upcoming PlayStation exclusive Death Stranding. Nonetheless, E3 remains the single biggest gaming event of the year, and the best snapshot of how the industry is defining itself and delivering what it believes consumers want to see.