E3’s soon-to-be 25-year history is having one less company to help celebrate. Sony has made the decision to not attend E3 2019, speaking with Game Informer, Sony stated:
“As the industry evolves, Sony Interactive Entertainment continues to look for inventive opportunities to engage the community. PlayStation fans mean the world to us and we always want to innovate, think differently and experiment with new ways to delight gamers. As a result, we have decided not to participate in E3 in 2019. We are exploring new and familiar ways to engage our community in 2019 and can’t wait to share our plans with you.”
This could be a massive blow to the gaming expo, Sony has some amazing games coming out soon and I think to not promote the future games they have releasing at E3 is crazy. They’re not alone though, in previous years, Activision and Blizzard baked out as well. PlayStation’s Senior Vice President of Communications, Jennifer Clark, added that they “will not activate or hold a press conference around E3.” either.
The move is interesting considering Sony also decided not to hold their PSX Conference this year, last year, fans complained that there wasn’t enough content. Jennifer Clark also mentioned that Sony is “looking at events as a whole and how we can speak more to our fans and continue to wow them. The timing of PSX and E3 didn’t allow for that. But lots of exciting things to come, and we hope to share shortly. Some of our biggest games will have key milestones next year so we will work hard to blow those up.”
Blizzard has been doing well the past decade with Blizzcon, so it makes sense that Sony might be trying to build their own solo event as well. As for pulling away from E3 in 2019, it will be interesting to see how E3 fills the gap, the Sony booth was a huge footprint on the show floor and now another company can come and take that spot to promote their games.
