The Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3) is a premier trade-event for video game industry where various hardware manufacturers, software developers, and publishers from the video game industry come together to showcase their new or upcoming products. The event is also streamed live for gamers to view and show support for their favourite brands.

E3 takes place annually in June at its location, Los Angeles Convention Centre in the United States. The E3 is organized by Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and only recently (in E3 2017) they opened the event doors to the public with 15,000 general-admittance passes available for purchase; before it was only limited to only industry partners and media partners.

However, according to an exclusive report by Gamedaily.biz, ESA is trying to rebrand E3 2020 as a “fan, media and influencer festival” and for that, they will be including 10,000 additional consumer passes for the E3 show floor.

ESA in their pitch deck for the E3 2020 showed plans to adapt the event in response to feedback they gathered from various partners and will be overhauling the event as such. In their pitch, ESA mentioned plans to have various high profile celebrity (or influencer) attractions and paid media partnerships in an attempt to increase the reach of E3 and have more control over the content.

Biggest gaming exhibitions / trade shows of by number of entries:



Gamescom 2019: 373k

ChinaJoy 2019: 365k

Brazil Games Show 2018: 325k

Taipei Game Show 2019: 320k

Paris Games Week 2018: 316k

Tokyo Game Show 2019: 262k

G-Star Korea 2018: 235k

…..

E3 2019: 66k — Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) September 16, 2019

ESA has also mentioned about their relationship with various talent agencies such as CAA (Creative Artists Agency) and UTA (United Talent Agency) for various activities involving content creation.

With the greater focus on consumers, ESA also plans to change the layout of the Convention Centre so as they can accommodate the increased number of consumer attendees in 2020. This change in layout and strategy will also open-up for direct marketing opportunities which will be aimed directly at attendees as they stand in line for demos.

All these changes and reforms were debated for years, but the response only came after to the recent E3 2019 presentation which was missing many big names such as Sony and Activision from the show floor and the leak of personal data of thousands of attendees. The year 2019 has already proved to be most challenging year for ESA and with the recent pitch deck, they hope for redemption and a smooth transition to 2020 event.