E3 is dead — how big was it, anyhow?

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is dead. Following cancellations in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, as well as Thursday’s revelation that it won’t return to Los Angeles in 2024 or 2025, either, you can safely stick a fork in the world’s former most influential gaming show. It’s done, replaced by events that stream online, like the Summer Game Fest, Nintendo Direct, PlayStation Showcase, Xbox Games Showcase, and Ubisoft Forward.

But given how seemingly easily it’s been replaced, you might be wondering: how big a deal was it, really?

In 2016, I wrote for CNET about how it was actually becoming less of a gamer’s mecca every year, and you aren’t really missing that much. But when I ran the numbers today, they told a slightly different story — E3 had roughly doubled in size and more than quadrupled in economic impact before the pandemic laid it low.

And its loss will be a blow to Los Angeles. Last year, LA Tourism executive director Doane Liu told dot.LA’s Samson Amore that E3 represented an injection of $83.4 million to the city’s economy, much of it in hotel rooms where the city collects tax revenue.

“We practically give away the convention center if [organizers] agree to book a certain number of hotel rooms... It’s really an incentive to bring business travel to Los Angeles,” Liu told the publication.

Historically, around 30,000 hotel room nights are booked each year — and so now that E3 2024 and another 2024 event have apparently been canceled, the city is looking at a sudden deficit of 51,000 hotel rooms, according to the LA Tourism Commission’s latest meeting packet.

E3 isn’t the only event that’s big business for LA, though. To put these numbers in perspective, the LA Tourism Board reported that E3 generated $75 million for the city in 2017 and that the Los Angeles Convention Center had a total economic impact of $780 million that year — so the big game show was only a tenth of what the city’s big expo building brought in, to say nothing of LA’s other attractions.

And, you could easily argue, E3 still wasn’t as big as it was in its heyday. The convention’s attendance record stands at 70,000 attendees, set back in 2005, and that record was set without any need to sell tickets to the public like E3 began doing in 2017.

Still, I didn’t realize E3 had grown so much in its final decade. Maybe E3 or something like it will rise again. Or maybe we’ll flock to shows designed around public attendees, like Gamescom and most of E3’s larger competitors.