The month of June has come and gone, and with almost all of the major video game presentations already taking place, the landscape of the video game Summer may have been irreversibly changed. The long-time giant of this time frame, E3, is now seemingly out of the picture, and now we have a much bigger idea as to why. Revealed through the Entertainment Software Association’s (ESA) financial statement, it cost the company more than $6 million to produce, cast, and put together E3 2021, and that was a digital-only event.

The Digital E3 2021 cost over $6 Milion and was a financial flop.https://t.co/2JFIm9aolz pic.twitter.com/p6qxTYX66y

— Knoebel (@Knoebelbroet) June 27, 2023

According to the statement ending in March 2022, the ESA paid Paragon Creative Agency $3.9 million for “Tradeshow Management” and $584,119 to Smithbucklin for the same. They also paid Game Cloud Network $1.6 million for the E3 Online Platform which was used as a main hub for gamers to congregate in and watch streams. The platform was famously buggy and mostly broken through the entire event. This roughly adds up to the aforementioned $6 million in total cost to run the event, and this doesn’t even include the expenses for guests and other special appearances.

The sheet also mentions that the ESA brought in $3.4 million in revenue for E3 2021, which is only slightly more than half of what the initial cost was to even get the event going in the first place. Keep in mind that this is only one major part of how the ESA operates as they still maintain a major presence within the video game industry as a whole. Unfortunately, with such a huge discrepancy of statistics in profit and expense, and with so many other publishers going out on their own for the Summer events, there’s a high chance that this was the last E3 event we’ve seen.

After attempting to bring the event back for this Summer, it was officially canceled after a wave of developers and publishers bowed out of the event to showcase on their own. If that wasn’t enough, it looks like we could be seeing the 2024 and 2025 iterations also get shut down before they’re even unveiled.