What to expect from Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft, and Bethesda at E3 2017
Dazzling press conferences. Heart-stopping trailers. A convention center packed with video games large and small. E3 is a magical week for anyone who likes to spend their free time pushing buttons on plastic gamepads.
Context & Ripple Effects
This preview slots into a three-year run of the same ritual: Ars Technica's E3 2016 lookahead and Engadget's E3 2018 version frame the identical cast — Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda — staging press-conference season around one Los Angeles week. In 2017 that format was still the industry's center of gravity, with every major publisher treating a single hour on stage as its biggest marketing moment of the year.
It matters because the corpus shows what came after: by 2021 the Washington Post was covering E3 weakened by the pandemic and Sony's withdrawal, and by 2023 Bloomberg reported Geoff Keighley's Summer Games Fest running 'in place of E3.' This 2017 piece captures the format at full strength, just before the structure underneath it started giving way.
First-order effects
- Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft, and Bethesda each convert a scripted press conference into the year's largest concentrated audience for game announcements, making their E3 stages the de facto release-calendar setters.
Second-order effects
- The format's value depends on full participation: once Sony withdraws, as later coverage documents, the remaining publishers lose the counter-programming rivalry that made the week worth attending, accelerating the exodus.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, trade-show gravity follows publishers rather than venues — by 2023 the reveal function migrates to Summer Games Fest, an organizer-led showcase with no convention center, leaving E3's physical-event economics without a reason to exist.
The trend: Game marketing is decoupling from the single-week trade show, with publisher-controlled digital showcases like Summer Games Fest absorbing the role E3's press-conference circuit played in 2017.