Former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime threw shade at E3 with a playful remark that gained quite a bit of traction among the fandom. His latest reflection on the Electronic Entertainment Expo arrived days after Nintendo confirmed it won't be attending E3 2023.
E3 has been shedding some of its historic glamour in recent years, not least because major publishers such as Nintendo and Sony started prioritizing their own events and even digital happenings like the Summer Game Fest over maintaining an annual presence at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated this loss in status following a 25-year run, leading to the cancelation of E3 2020 and a generic digital event a year later. While the organizers initially planned to try another virtual event, E3 2022 was eventually canceled as well.
Fils-Aime now appears to have taken aim at this state of affairs, likening the current "emptiness" of the virtual E3 community in Miiverse on the Wii U to the "new reality" of the show. The cheeky March 6 post hit a million views in the first 20 hours, even prompting a response from Canadian journalist Geoff Keighley, one of the key organizers behind The Game Awards show that had been bleeding E3 of major announcements for half a decade prior to the expo's pandemic-induced troubles.
Fils-Aime's former employer last appeared at the long-running expo with a special Nintendo Direct hosted as part of E3 2021. While that broadcast wasn't exactly lacking in compelling content, Nintendo's already been winding down its support of both E3 and every other trade show for around a decade by that point. This ongoing trend is presumably rooted in the company's desire to have a separate news cycle dedicated to its own games whenever it has major announcements to share instead of competing for viewership with other companies.
Nintendo is far from the only major game publisher that seems to be have adopted this line of reasoning, as evidenced by the fact that the increasing frequency of its Direct broadcasts has been followed by a similar rise in PlayStation's State of Play shows and Xbox Developer Direct events. A recent report even claimed both Sony and Microsoft will skip E3 2023, which would leave the trade show without the industry's three largest publishers.
That said, it remains to be seen whether Microsoft does end up missing the expo, given how it's historically been a bigger partner to E3 than both Sony and Nintendo, and in light of the recent announcement of the Xbox summer showcase that's not only happening in June but will even include a physical event in Los Angeles. On the other hand, hosting an E3-adjacent LA event wouldn't be an entirely unprecedented move, seeing how that's precisely what Electronic Arts did with its EA Play shows on multiple past occasions.