One of the annual gaming events during the Summer will not be taking place this year. EA has announced that their EA Play 2022 has officially been canceled, and is yet another major blow to a rather worrying situation for the future of E3 this year. EA made this revelation to IGN, in which they state that while they would prefer to have a showcase of their upcoming IPs, the timing apparently isn’t right and that they’ll be revealing more information about these titles in the foreseeable future.
There are a couple of things to take away from this new statement. The first and foremost is that EA possibly doesn’t have enough projects or updates to existing ones to justify having their own event this year. The other is that they’re gearing up to make their own reveals for each IP on their own times and own terms. While this is merely speculation, the latter is a more than likely scenario, as more and more publishers in recent years have taken to having livestreams for announcement trailers and gameplay reveals, such as Sony’s upcoming State of Play with Hogwarts Legacy.
Last year’s EA Play was mainly utilized as the major reveal for Battlefield 2042. There were some other projects shown alongside that, such as the Dead Space Remake, but there was also slew of desired entries that did not make an appearance and have since given little to no information regarding their production. The video game industry is also still reeling from the worldwide effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic, which has stalled some projects considerably. As we mentioned earlier, the current state of E3 is currently unknown, especially when we’re very close to the beginning of Spring. At the very least, we have Geoff Keighly’s Summer Game Fest to look forward to.