Game publishing giant Electronic Arts Inc has announced that it will not have a presence on the show floor at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), saying that it will instead be holding its own fan-oriented event called EA Play to showcase its upcoming games.

EA Play will simultaneously take place in both Los Angeles and London on June 12, and EA promises that the event will give fans the opportunity to watch and play all of its biggest upcoming titles. The London event will be one day only, but the Los Angeles event will last through June 14.

“We’ll bring the new games, we’ll bring the demos, we’ll bring the competition…and you get to go hands-on,” EA said on the event’s website. “Or join us online and immerse yourself to experience some of our biggest games of the year. Let’s live to play together.”

Is E3 old news?

While E3 started out as an event for industry professionals, it quickly grew to include a large number of fans and saw an increasingly unwieldy turn out every year. For that reason, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) announced in 2006 that it would be greatly reducing the size of the event by making it invite only.

This returned E3 to its professional and media-oriented roots, but it also locked fans out of what is widely considered the biggest gaming event of the year.

As a result, fan-oriented events have become an increasingly popular way for major publishers and studios to connect directly with their audience. Of course, they also have the added benefit of allowing publishers to make major announcements without having to compete for attention with other developers.

This trend is nothing new, as events like Id Software’s Quakecon and Blizzard Entertainment’s Blizzcon have been running since 1996 and 2005, respectively. In the case of Blizzcon, the event has gradually grown in importance for the studio, and Blizzard has made several major announcements during its own event rather than at E3.

More recently, in 2014 Sony Computer Entertainment (which will soon be Sony Interactive Entertainment) kicked off the first ever PlayStation Experience, a special two day fan event that Sony uses to showcase dozens of games coming to the PlayStation console.

Photo by – EMR –