With a global pandemic shutting down conventions (among other things) worldwide, gaming's biggest publishers still scored huge viewership without E3. Sony has already made a habit of skipping the annual showcase in favor of doing its own in-house presentations, but with E3 not being held in 2020, other publishers like Ubisoft took the leap into solo productions as well.

It's known that Sony did not partake in E3 2019 in any capacity, and this year the company announced that it was passing on E3 2020 long before the convention was even cancelled. Instead, Sony used its State of Play event to showcase the next Spider-Man title, some promising new IP, and even capped off the presentation with the reveal of the much-hyped PS5 console. Ubisoft soon followed suit, hosting its first-ever Ubisoft Forward event in July.

It turns out that all of these decisions worked out incredibly well for the companies, as recently-published data from SuperData shows some very promising results. According to SuperData, Sony's PS5 reveal event had an average minute audience of 1.51 million on Twitch, surpassing Xbox's E3 2019 briefing which had .94 million (and continuing the perpetual console wars in the process), the 2019 Game Awards (.62 million), and Nintendo's E3 2019 Direct (.56 million). The data also looked at the first Ubisoft Forward event and found that, across official streams and rebroadcasts, the event had an average minute audience of 1.02 million. For comparison, E3 2019 drew .75 million (official streams and rebroadcasts).


For Ubisoft in particular, a company that has had a tumultuous year riddled with controversy, it is promising that an in-house event showcasing upcoming releases still managed to do as well as it did. The first Ubisoft Forward event has proven to be so successful for the troubled publisher, that the firm has already announced a second one coming in September. Meanwhile, Sony seemingly saw the writing on the wall for E3 long ago, instead opting to build a platform for its own time in the spotlight. The demand was already built-in for Sony, significantly more so than for Ubisoft but (in both cases) the unusual situation the world has found itself in this year was the push that some publishers needed to do things their way. Clearly, for the giants in the video game industry, E3 needs them more than they need E3 now.

However, a looked over casualty of the decline of E3 and the subsequent rise of independent showcases, are the smaller studios and publishers, who do not have access to the same resources that Sony and Ubisoft do. E3 and other conventions like it were a chance for people working in the industry to show people directly what they have to offer, as well as network and get their names out there. But, without these opportunities, the charm and unrestricted innovation of indie gaming may fall by the wayside, severely altering the video game industry – potentially permanently.