It was about a month ago that the Entertainment Software Association announced that it would be canceling this year"s edition of E3 in light of the coronavirus outbreak. At the time, the organization said it was working on creating a replacement online experience, and later promised to bring back the show in 2021 as a "re-imagined" event.
However, there hasn"t been any news about this online experience, and now it has also been canceled. In a statement to PCGamer, an ESA representative said:
"Given the disruption brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, we will not be presenting an online E3 2020 event in June. Instead, we will be working with exhibitors to promote and showcase individual company announcements, including on www.E3expo.com, in the coming months (...)."
The cancellation of the event probably doesn"t come as a huge surprise, since coordinating an online event with multiple companies on such short notice would be a challenge. Some publishers, like Bethesda, had also announced that they wouldn"t have a replacement digital event in June, so it made less sense for the effort to go forward.
While the ESA has given up on coordinating a unified online event, it will be helping developers host individual events and announcements, and the E3 website will still be a place for those announcements to be made. The organization also reiterated its intentions to deliver a re-imagined event in 2021.