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E3 2019 attendance was down over last year

The biggest gaming event of the year brought in 3,000 less than the year before.

Josh Hawkins

June 14, 2019 9:15 AM

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2019 was a big year for E3. While some of the bigger publishers might have been missing from the ceremonies and the show floor, Xbox, Nintendo, and others more than made up for them with their reveals. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that attendance was as good as it could have been, and a report from the ESA shows that E3 2019 attracted 66,100 attendees, just over 3,000 less attendees than E3 2018.

The report comes via an official press release on the ESA’s website. Of course, this number is still relatively higher than attendance in 2016, the last of the pre-consumer conferences. It definitely seems like the ESA has accomplished what they set out to do when they decided to allow the general public into the show, boosting the numbers quite a bit. While it’s sad to see publishers like EA, Activision, and PlayStation missing from the show floor, it opened the door for a slew of new exhibitors to move in and show off their content.

According to the ESA, over 200 exhibitors made their way to E3 2019, and over a quarter of the people that exhibited their content at the event had never done so in the past. The report also mentioned that Twitter had seen over 3.2 million conversations surrounding E3 over the past week, making it one of the most talked about things in the social media landscape.

The lower attendance from last year hasn’t stopped the ESA from pushing forward, though. E3 2020 is already set to take place between June 9 and 11 next year. If you’re looking to attend and experience the conference firsthand, you’ll want to set about making plans now, as hotels and the like will begin to book up as the months pass by.

If you missed any of the action from this year’s show, then make sure you check out our E3 2019 hub. We’ll also have a ton of hands-on previews coming out over the next few days, so make sure you follow Shacknews on Twitter to easily keep up with all our newest content.

Josh Hawkins

Guides Editor

Joshua holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and has been exploring the world of video games for as long as he can remember. He enjoys everything from large-scale RPGs to small, bite-size indie gems and everything in between.