Where Gamers Go to Stand in Queues

On December 12, 2023, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) announced that E3, the formerly biggest video game trade show for industry professionals in the United States, will cease its operations for good. After being canceled in 2020 and held online in 2021, the convention was supposed to take place as an in-person event in Los Angeles again in June 2022. However, the event never materialized, and even an agreement between ReedPop, organizers of the popular video game conventions Pax East and Pax West, and the ESA for 2023 couldn't save it from a last-minute cancellation due to an alleged lack of interest by industry players. While the event was one of the most relevant showcases for new developments in the video game sector in the 2000s and 2010s, its 2019 attendance number of 66,000 visitors doesn't even place E3 in the top eight of the largest video game trade fairs worldwide.

As our chart based on media and organizer reports shows, the China Digital Entertainment Expo & Conference, or ChinaJoy, is the biggest video game convention in terms of attendees. Its 2023 edition saw 338,000 entries over four days, reflecting the status of China as the second-biggest market for video games despite the government of the People's Republic being notoriously strict in terms of video game licenses for its domestic market.

ChinaJoy is closely followed by the Brazil Games Show with 328,000 attendees. This event can be considered an outlier since most of the best-attended trade shows take place in Europe or Asia. Gamescom, the most-visited video game convention worldwide before the coronavirus pandemic, saw 53,000 fewer visitors in 2023 than at its last pre-pandemic edition in 2019.

Even when factoring out the effects of the pandemic, the importance of in-person video game conventions on a large scale has been waning over the past years. For example, 2019 was the first year that Sony didn't participate in E3, opting to host their independent showcase State of Play instead. Electronic Arts canceled their EA Play live event for 2022 before E3 itself was canceled, and for Nintendo, the pre-recorded regular Nintendo Direct showcases have arguably become more important than B2C presences at video game conventions. Microsoft also tends to feature its most relevant titles in its Xbox Developer Direct events, revealing the first gameplay footage of its upcoming Indiana Jones game on January 18.

The annual Game Awards hosted by Geoff Keighley are seen as another competitor to the model of major announcements at trade fairs, with the 2023 edition seeing the reveals of games like Monster Hunter Wilds, a new entry into the classic Crazy Taxi franchise and Jurassic Park: Survival.