PAX and New York Comic-Con organizer ReedPop will be taking over the organization of E3 2023. ReedPop says it's looking forward to keeping "what's always worked" about E3 and working on what doesn't work in order to create a "world class event".
What will ReedPop's E3 2023 look like?
Last month, the Entertainment Software Association, which serves as E3's parent company, officially announced E3 2023, which will be a physical conference. Now, thanks to VGC, we know who's going to be organizing the event: ReedPop, the organizer of various conventions including PAX, the New York Comic-Con, and EGX, as well as the Star Wars Celebration. ReedPop also happens to be VGC's parent company via Gamer Network, which also oversees a number of other prominent publications in the gaming industry.
ReedPop says that it will be welcoming "publishers, developers, journalists, content creators", and various other professionals from the gaming industry to E3 2023. The company's president, Lance Fensterman, describes the opportunity to curate the event as "a tremendous honor and privilege", with ReedPop's gaming VP Kyle Marsden-Kish adding that the event will be "recognizably epic" and a "new benchmark for video game expos in 2023 and beyond". B2B games head Christopher Dring says he wants to make E3 "more of a celebration, and less like a battleground", so it sounds like ReedPop has some pretty big plans for E3 2023.
What's happened to E3?
If you haven't thought about E3 for a while, rest assured that you're not alone. The last in-person conference was held in 2019, with E3 2020 canceled due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. E3 returned for 2021, by which time Geoff Keighley's new Summer Game Fest event had firmly established itself as a solid alternative to the conference (albeit one that effectively merged with E3 in 2021). When it was subsequently announced that E3 2022 would be canceled on both an in-person and digital basis, many gamers assumed that the conference wouldn't be returning for another event, but the ESA then revealed that E3 2023 would go ahead.
We'll have to wait and see what ReedPop has in store for E3 2023. One suspects it'll have to be something special in order to re-establish the conference in the minds of gamers who've pretty much been doing just fine without it for the last year. Still, the fact that it'll be an in-person conference will be good news to many who miss the crowds, so it's possible that ReedPop and the ESA can revive E3's reputation and restore it to its former "glory". We'll bring you more on this as soon as we get it.
