Ubisoft is still going to host a preview event in June but it won’t be on the show floor at E3, as the event loses another big publisher.
The first live E3 event since 2019 is due to take place this June but the list of major attendees has now shrunk almost to nothing. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft already said they wouldn’t be attending and now Ubisoft has changed their mind and said they won’t be there either.
‘E3 has fostered unforgettable moments across the industry throughout the years,’ said Ubisoft in a statement. ‘While we initially intended to have an official E3 presence, we’ve made the subsequent decision to move in a different direction and will be holding a Ubisoft Forward Live event on 12th June in Los Angeles.’
The Ubisoft Forward events are their equivalent of a Nintendo Direct or State of Play and Ubisoft has been using them as a showcase ever since the pandemic made E3 impossible.
E3 itself starts on June 13 and Microsoft has its own showcase planned for the 11th, which is similar to how E3 always used to work – with the big publisher preview events taking place a few days before E3 itself.
However, those publishers always then used to attend E3, with massive stands of their own, but if they’re not doing that this year then the E3 part of the equation suddenly become irrelevant. Especially as Sony and Nintendo have not confirmed showcases of their own.
It now seems like the Summer Game Fest event, run by The Game Awards’ Geoff Keighley, will take over the role that E3 once did, at least in terms of debuting new game announcements and trailers.
This year’s Summer Game Fest is due to take place on June 8, the week before E3, and while for the last few years The Game Awards has been the premier preview event in the industry it seems Summer Game Fest may start to take over more of that role in the future.
However, it remains to be seen how many new games publishers actually have to unveil. Nintendo’s official reason for not taking part in E3 is that they don’t have enough new games at the moment to justify it.
Others seem to be in a similar position and it’s only Microsoft which has implied it has a lot to show off, at least in terms of games it’s officially announced but never shown in public.
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