For the first time in its 24-year history, Sony Interactive Entertainment will not be present at the 2019 E3 Expo. In a statement the company released to GameInformer, Sony explained their withdrawal from the U.S.’s biggest gaming conference of the year:
“As the industry evolves, Sony Interactive Entertainment continues to look for inventive opportunities to engage the community. PlayStation fans mean the world to us and we always want to innovate, think differently and experiment with new ways to delight gamers,” the company said. “As a result, we have decided not to participate in E3 in 2019. We are exploring new and familiar ways to engage our community in 2019 and can’t wait to share our plans with you.”
E3 isn’t the only thing Sony is cutting out of their tradeshow plans. The company had previously announced that they are reducing the number of fan events as well. They also canceled this year’s PlayStation Experience event, citing a lack of games as a reason.
Despite the withdrawal from E3, Sony did state that they are exploring new and familiar ways to engage with their community in 2019. Sony does state that they have things to share but those things just won’t be at E3. One would think Sony would go the route of Nintendo by just offering a pre-recorded video but Sony isn’t even planning to do something like that.
Sony did state that they are still looking to promote Dreams and Days Gone as upcoming titles but didn’t mention any other titles beyond that. CEO Kenichiro Yoshida did tease the next installment in the PlayStation’s gaming hardware by stating “At this point, what I can say is it’s necessary to have a next-generation hardware.” Whether or not that will be called PlayStation 5 or the next iteration of PlayStation 4 Pro remains to be seen but whatever it ends up being, the next console is on Sony’s radar. The PlayStation 4 was released on November 15, 2013, which means that it just celebrated its 5-year birthday (congrats!). Given that a console’s lifecycle is (typically) 10 years, the next console is generally announced around this time. Then, we get about a 1 1/2 – 2 year wait before it’s released and the final three years of the lifecycle is spent dwindling down the number of games available on that system while pushing the next generation.
So fear not, Sony fans. They may be skipping E3 but it seems like they will be announcing things as they come.
