First kicking off in 2016, Electronic Arts has traditionally used the week of E3 in early June to hold its own EA Play Live event, during which the publisher would make many of its biggest announcements for the year. That’s coming to an end in 2022.
EA has decided to cancel this year’s event, in favour of what sounds like holding smaller showcases focused on each new and upcoming game individually. In a statement sent to IGN, the publisher says:
We love EA Play Live as it’s our way of connecting with our players and sharing what’s new with all of you. However, this year things aren’t lining up to show you everything on one date. We have exciting things happening at our world-class studios and this year we’ll reveal much more about these projects when the time is right for each of them. We look forward to spending time with you throughout the year!
The move is hardly a surprise. Last year’s EA Play Live skipped E3 entirely and went down a few weeks later in July, and with E3 itself looking like a non-starter this year there was little impetus for EA to keep to that traditional announcement schedule.
That’s…presumably fine for most of you, I guess? I can’t ever remember a year that people got hyped for EA’s announcements at E3, or even EA Play Live, as a lot of the publisher’s big announcements were already being made on their own timelines.
It’s pretty grim news for anyone still clinging to a love of the old-fashioned E3/summer announcement season, though. EA Play Live was only invented because E3 was running out of steam, so for EA Play Live itself to get binned says a lot about how dead that old “here’s all our new stuff in one place!” trend seems to be in 2022.
