The rumors surrounding Sony have been confirmed, as the video game giant will not be attending E3 for the second year in a row. Sony was a staple of the E3 conference dating all the way back to the first show, but the company decided to skip the 2019 event, to the shock of fans and pundits around the world.
Sony announced that it wasn't attending E3 2019, with the reasoning that it wanted to reach out to fans in different ways. Since then, Sony has been hosting State of Play events that have revealed new games, though these have often paled in comparison to the similar events held by Microsoft and Nintendo. The competition took advantage of the huge gap in the E3 limelight, but that didn't hamper the PlayStation brand too much, as Sony was the third most popular publisher at E3, despite not being there, thanks to a number of high-profile third-party games, like Final Fantasy VII Remake.
There have been rumors circulating that Sony was planning on skipping E3 2020 and these have now been confirmed by GamesIndustry.biz. Sony has decided that it will be attending hundreds of consumer events around the globe, which discounts the upcoming E3 conference, as it doesn't match the company's vision for 2020.
"We have great respect for the ESA as an organization, but we do not feel the vision of E3 2020 is the right venue for what we are focused on this year. We will build upon our global events strategy in 2020 by participating in hundreds of consumer events across the globe. Our focus is on making sure fans feel part of the PlayStation family and have access to play their favorite content. We have a fantastic line up of titles coming to PlayStation 4, and with the upcoming launch of PlayStation 5, we are truly looking forward to a year of celebration with our fans."
Sony's absence at E3 2020 is more of a problem for the organizers of E3 than Sony. PlayStation is the best-selling home console brand of all time and the PlayStation 4 decimated the competition during the current console generation. It's likely that Microsoft will be using E3 2020 to reveal more information about the Xbox Series X, while Nintendo has a rumored hardware revision for the Nintendo Switch that will also need to be announced at some point and E3 seems the most likely venue. If Sony wants to reveal more information about the PlayStation 5, then it can do so under its own terms without competing for headline space with the competition.
The PlayStation 5 is due to be released during the 2020 holiday season, so Sony can't keep playing coy forever. The company will need to start revealing more details about the PlayStation 5 and soon. Microsoft has already revealed a lot about the Xbox Series X and fans of that console brand know what to expect going in. There are still a lot of questions that Sony fans have about the PlayStation 5 and they have been waiting eagerly for more information, but it seems that they won't find answers at E3 2020.
Source: GamesIndustry.biz