E3 2021 lost its organizers millions of dollars, according to some newly publicized tax filings from the Entertainment Software Association. This bit of insight into the challenges facing the long-running trade show arrived shortly after some public records suggested the next two E3s might have already been canceled.
And while the ESA promptly denied those E3 2024 and 2025 cancellation rumors, the event itself still appears to be on the ropes nowadays. The main factor informing that widespread perspective is the fact that three out of the last four editions of E3 had been canceled.
As for the only one that wasn't, the ESA's latest tax statement reveals that E3 2021 lost the trade association millions of dollars; over the 10-week period preceding that iteration of the show, its organizers spent in excess of $6 million on putting it together, while the event itself generated just $3.4 million in revenue. The $2.6 million difference might actually be even larger, as the ESA's newest tax statement only covers the 12-month stretch starting April 2021, whereas the organization of the digital-only E3 2021 plausibly began beforehand. Furthermore, the $6 million figure doesn't account for employee wages and only includes a few of the nonprofit's highest-compensated independent contractors during its 2022 fiscal year.
Of those, Paragon Creative Agency and Smithbucklin received $3,900,807 and $584,119, respectively, for trade show management. Game Cloud Network was also compensated $1,628,333 for its E3 Online Platform, which received near-universal criticism and prompted widespread calls for E3 to improve its online presentations. The ESA also spent $9.68 million on wages during the observed 12-month period, and while the 2021 E3 presumably wasn't its employees' sole focus for the first 10 weeks of the detailed fiscal year, that figure still indicates the show's extrapolated expenses could be up to $1.8 million higher.
These underwhelming financials raise more concerns about the future of E3, whose reputation has already been nosediving since the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic. The organizers cited the pandemic as the main reason for scrapping the 2020 and 2022 editions of the show, while this year's E3 was canceled because of an overall lack of interest from publishers. Given that state of affairs and in spite of the ESA's insistence that the event could still make a comeback in some shape or form come next year, the idea that E3 may never recover from its 2023 cancellation is already entrenched in the public consciousness.