E3 2020 Cancelled | Hacker News Reader

E3 2020 Cancelled

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351 pointshaunter112 comments

The NAB show 2020 (April 18 - 22, Las Vegas) is still holding out, "The Show is On. Stay Informed.": https://nabshow.com/2020/attend/onsite-services/coronavirus-...

I wonder how many more days until they cancel as well.

We have booked a stand and are planning to show a demo. Flights and hotels are booked. It feels slightly weird working on the demo, with the very high chance of it not happening after all.

Honestly at this point the socially responsible thing to do is not to attend, regardless of whether they cancel or not. You are not just putting yourself at risk by attending. We all must take steps to combat the spread.

But I don't envy your position, I know these are tough calls to make.

As an organizer of a very small event coming up in mid April, I'm terrified of the flu ransacking our group and killing some of our members many of whom are straight up sick and elderly. We're giving guidance to stay home if they're at risk, but I know if we have the show they'll be there.

If we cancel the show it'll be devastating in other ways, and our group is overall conservative and fiercely advocates personal responsibility. Needless to say, if we cancel it will possibly implode the group or cause similar clubs to take over a 30 year tradition.

What do I do?

The responsible thing to do is cancel, even though I know you're feeling damned if you do.

I suggest waiting a few days if you can and then cancel.

News will be way worse than now, which allows you to excuse yourself better.

I work on a virtual conference platform, we've had significant increase in interest in the last couple months... you might want to look into hosting a virtual conference to uphold your tradition and be responsible at the same time.

We will be teleconferencing. Perhaps I will advertise that option more.

There's a third option, postpone it a couple months.

Not viable imo. There's likely no cure coming this year. In a couple months the virus will be more disbursed and pose an even greater threat of transmission to our attendees that are old or sick and refuse to stay home.

You could say "let's try in August" and if warm weather has positive effects, then I guess it goes ahead, or if not, you just flat out cancel.

It's irresponsible to hold events right now.

The warm weather thing keeps coming up. Sure it’ll be warm where most the population is, but the other half of the world is going into winter.

No one really knows if it has any effect anyway, yet, from what I can tell.

shouldn't we be able to tell from countries on the equator? Or is too early to tell?

That’s what we’re doing with an event originally scheduled for May. We’re postponing until September and hoping for positive news over the summer.

Seems like the best course of action if you can swing it.

That is a problem you can handle in a couple months.

At worst, it'll give you more hindsight, and at best time will help people see reason.

Call the local jurisdiction where your event is being held and 'ask' them if you should cancel it. 'If' they say yes, then call your insurer.

Love the quotes on this. Those individuals you're asking are guaranteed to be risk averse from a game theory perspective, rightly or wrongly (probably rightly here).

Take a look at the Biogen conference. 70 of 92 coronavirus cases in MA are linked to the employees of that company, and the conference is thought to have been a major vector [1].

Ask yourself if that's a risk you're welling to take having been associated with that conference.

I think event organizers are in a particularly brutal position. I know that the credibility and finances of a lot of events are on a thread, and that cancellation can crush the event (even in the future). It's a tough decision.

Were it me, I would cancel, because I think it's the responsible thing to do.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/11/health/coronavirus-massachuse...

> Ask yourself if that's a risk you're welling to take having been associated with that conference.

This seems to be as if making a choice between what actually might be good and how something might impact you personally (psychologically or otherwise).

It's the difference between thinking 'I could never live with myself if that carnival amusement ride killed a child' vs. 'I'd hate to have a child killed on that carnival ride'.

Not criticism of what you are saying - just pointing this out.

Totally fair, I went back and forth on the wording a few times, and never felt like I got it quite right.

I didn't want to come across as saying "You will have blood on your wants if you do this", but I think there is a risk that there will be blood on the hands of event organizers.

I guess I didn't know how to frame it other than "are you willing to risk this outcome?"

I'll back you on your wording. Made perfect sense to me and I'm right at Ground Zero (Redmond, WA) of the US outbreak and in the high risk cohort (old, fat, diabetic). These decisions have to be made as you've phrased it.

It's good wording that by chance I already realized last night when I was talking to our 70 year old organizer who's going through chemo and he was telling me he's coming...

I really don't want his blood on my hands. If it's decided to push forward, I'll do what I can to stop people from taking unnecessary risks.

Since they are a group of people who are heavily into "personal responsibility," as you put it, then why not leverage that to make your point.

"I feel it is my personal responsibility to maintain the sanctity of our group and ensure the safety of everyone involved, especially those who are most vulnerable among us. It is important that we all understand the risks involved: should we decide to proceed, there is the possibility that our group will be directly responsible for knowingly facilitating the spread of a virus with a mortality rate estimated to be around 3%. Should this virus surface at our event, the likelihood of someone we all know succumbing to the infection is quite high.

Given the gravity of the situation and potential implications to our personal lives, are we certain that we wish to proceed?"

Good luck and stay safe.

Thanks this is a good case study to present to the board. It's one I was unaware of that closely mimics our conference.

Surely a group of conservative old, wise people who advocate personal responsibility would all choose not to attend an event while a novel virus is spreading around the world?

Ask for updated RSVPs, and when you see 0 plan to attend your event nor any alternative, cancel this year's live event.

In an effort to try not to be too political, not all conservatives are always capable of making the best personally responsible choices...

But where I stand on that is that's their problem, not mine. At the same time as the lead organizer I don't want their blood on my hands. It's a conundrum for sure. I liked one of these other posters that said to wait for things to get worse and then cancel haha.

The same thing is true of going to work.

The risk model is different based on a lot of varieties. If you're working in an office in an unaffected area, nobody is traveling and there's no high risk, it's not necessarily a big deal.

If you're in a major corporation and your coworkers fly all over creation - then yeah, time to start feigning a cough and taking a few sickdays to work at home.

Which is why many companies are encouraging their employees to work from home when possible.

Not nearly enough. Some are resisting for no apparent reason. (no technical reason)

Which puts you, the employee, in the position of deciding whether you are going to defy them, or not.

I started working from home yesterday.

But traveling to conference is worse than just going to your office.

My work consists of several things based around events (a website and planning a workshop/performance).

Pretty sure none of those are going to happen. Neither is the wedding I got invited to yesterday - or probably the dinner invite for 3 weeks from now.

I'm not sure what to say to people who are involving me in their plans for April and May...

In Italy, all weddings and funerals have been shut down until at least April 3rd.

It's the sensible thing to do

https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

Well, the truth: that you will be glad to attend if things get better, but that most likely they won't.

I honestly see no reason for events that far out to cancel today. It does seem likely that they will have to do so eventually but they don't have to commit to that until the end of the month.

People are buying tickets right now and it's irresponsible to be selling them.

No it's not. As of now the show is on so they're selling valid tickets. If they do cancel then they'll refund the cost.

But what about the cost of the booths, the displays, the printed material, the plane tickets, the hotel rooms?

Months of planning and hundreds of thousands of dollars goes into an NAB vendor booth.

That’s on the attendees. Random events happen. It’s no different than a sudden earthquake ruining plans. Doesn’t mean the conference is at fault.

> If they do cancel then they'll refund the cost.

Several major events have 'cancelled' this year by 'postponing' it until next year, giving no refunds. I wouldn't count on that being true.

Plane tickets, too. Can those be refunded?

Most US domestic airlines are just providing travel credit with no cancellation or change fees. I had to cancel a month of business travel just now on several airlines and incurred no cost—I just have to use the credit in the next year which in my case is absolutely not an issue.

It's very difficult for these events to refund people. Unless they have some big industry sponsors, a lot is based on ticket sales. Deposits on venues are usually made with the profit left over from last year.

E3 is different because the big companies can choose to eat or write off the loss, or give money more starting capital to organizers for next year. For smaller events like say, a dance weekend or puppet festival, a lot of those are labour of love type events that have been built up slowly over the years. Those will be the groups hardest hit.

Plane tickets, conference tickets, hotel reservations (which aren't always refundable) ...

Every day delayed is more hassle for would-be attendees to deal with.

On the website it says:

> NAB has been monitoring the evolving situation on coronavirus both in the U.S. and around the globe. Due to the public health emergency we are currently facing, we believe that it is not possible to move forward with NAB Show as planned. Please see below for a message from NAB’s president and CEO Gordon H. Smith, along with some FAQs about the decision.

So I guess 0 days!

More concisely: https://nabshow.com/2020/

> An Update On 2020 NAB Show

> NAB Show will not take place this April in Las Vegas

For a media event they really need to work on their messaging.

Maybe this is the media equivalent of having half a dozen CS PhDs standing around a computer trying to get the projector working.

Oh, wow, interesting timing. I guess I'll call it a day then with my work on the demo, and head home...

So no more hourly spam from shady orgs trying to sell me a list of attendees? Nooooo...

EDIT: NAB is Official Postponed now [1]. I got the email right after hitting send on this.

[1] https://nabshow.com/2020/attend/onsite-services/coronavirus-...

I'm in the industry. Many of our most important customers have already announced they are not going. The company I work for has pulled out of the show, along with many others.

The company I work for believes the show will be cancelled, so better to cancel flights and hotels now than later.

My bet is that like a lot of shows, they have a ton of money on the line. Their insurance/cancellation policies only kick in if the government steps in a says "you may not do this," so they are waiting for that to happen. Nevada is tourist-driven, so they don't want to do it. We need some leadership from the Executive Branch.

The logic behind this is that if the organizer cancels the event unilaterally, it's on the hook for the whole cost and might go bankrupt. If they are ordered to cancel by a local authority, they can invoke the force majeure clause in their business insurance and mitigate the loss.

If they don't keep up a happy face until they are ordered to cancel, they could in turn be sued by contractors who end up holding the economic bag and argue that the event organizers chose to upset the applecart when they didn't have to. .

Other option is given that less time to cancel could mean higher losses is to come to an agreement with the insurer to agree to cover prior to government authorities cancelling based on likely possibility of that happening.

I will point out that the city or town officials (mayor or health inspectors) are in the same boat. Do they wait and see how things progress, or do they issue that declaration and forego lots of event revenue and business. Except their decision is the official one on which all these insurance claims will be based. Not easy either, and yeah, they’re supposed to be the authority, but they’re also just people struggling with these momentous decisions as well.

I thought many insurance policies specifically excluded force majeure from coverage.

It looks like NAB was just cancelled.

They just tweeted it about 20 minutes ago [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/NABShow/status/1237801294246694912

This also got cancelled it seems.

We were crunching to get some core features done for a demo at what for us would have been a huge deal conference, and then last week they cancelled it.

It was both a feeling of relief and disappointment

Fun anecdote: I flew from FL to CA in 2000 for E3 when it was a press-only event. That was the first and last time I've had to have a doctor come to my hotel room (on Day 2 of the show) to give me a shot in the ass for some sort of strep/flu. I forget what it was, or what the shot was, but 18-year-old me sprung back into action the next day... and probably passed whatever I had to every hand I shook.

All the recent headlines read like from "Plague Inc.", I have never thought I would live in such times.

Well it is pretty much Zombie Apocalypse replete with all the reasons why movies, shows, games, and novels, always have the world become overrun. Yet people ridicule them for it and here we are, containment does not work in societies with such freedom of travel and no recollection of past events.

Throw in now in many countries the level of self entitlement is so high that it truly is hard to quarantine people voluntarily. Yes you still have those who respect the law and others but we have far too many who either put themselves above both or just act maliciously.

Let us all hope it is an over reaction

If it works, it will look like an overreaction.

If it doesn't work, there will be cries about how not enough was done.

Like in IT/DevOps/etc. when you're doing your job very well, your job looks unnecessary.

>The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.

(Mark Twain, I think, but there are enough fake quotes even on major sites so I'm never sure.)

Every day I find new reasons to appreciate the quote.

With rumors of Sony and Microsoft's consoles coming out at the end of this year, does anyone know if this event would have any impact on that? I'd imagine being able to leverage this sort of event for generating buzz and interest helps with their sales to some extent so I'd be very curious to see if they decide to delay their release.

Sony was already skipping E3 anyway.

Nikon delayed their D6 DSLR, and I imagine it will get difficult to even produce things like that at the volume they'd need for a launch.

Many publishers were already doing their own thing around E3, both in time and location. Sony was not even participating in E3 2020. It is far far less important than it used to be for the industry

E3 2019 might have well been the last one.

I doubt an e3 cancellation would cause a delay but the virus has made sourcing hardware a lot harder. If they do keep dates they'll see shortages.

Unlikely-- E3 (like the other big trade shows in general) has been getting progressively less relevant industry-wide each year, in favor of more direct-to-consumer messaging (like Nintendo's Nintendo Direct presentations). Sony even announced they weren't participating back in January, before all this COVID-19 mess.

This is true. Big companies were the first to pull out of GDC as well. I think the big players feel they have to spend a lot to keep up and they don't get a lot out of it.

I believe the smaller companies are the ones that tend to benefit from the big conferences, because it gives them a chance to talk to people all over the world who might not otherwise be available. Speaking for myself, these cancellations are understandable, but a big problem for my work.

I've heard it was more important, at GDC at least, for indies because you have legendary devs walking around who can help small teams get deals or contacts with bigger networks. Make a demo that catches the eye of the right person and it can be really helpful.

Exactly-- you meet new teams you may want to do business with. Devs meet people who want to invest. Not exactly helpful for EA or Activision, but big help to others.

Sony had already cancelled, so there's no difference to them. I don't see either company delaying the release due to E3 being cancelled. Other supply line constraints from the same root cause, maybe.

There's been a shift to siloed announcements anyways. Nintendo Direct have been recurring chunks of announcements, I don't see why Sony and MS wouldn't start doing the same.

Sony: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/state-of-play/

Microsoft: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/insidexbox/

Sony skipped last E3 and also this one. They did not like the new direction the event was supposedly taking. Geoff Keighley also decided to not do his E3 Coliseum show that he used to host for multiple years.

I think supply chain disruptions for manufacturing the new hardware and disruption to development of the launch games are probably more likely to affect the release plans.

Yeah I'm with you. Not only that but if there's any sort of self-isolation, people aren't going to be going to the shops to queue for a new console even if there are no disruptions to the supply chain.

There are not many people actually going to e3.

I was always curious why it matters at all.

As a consumer you have to wait ages and as a journalist you are there a day earlier or have invites.

It's much cheaper to invite all relevant journalist on a global scale.

But honestly? If I'm able to watch the release show from companies like Ms Sony and co live on YouTube I will do that.

I assume this creates more then enough buzz already.

E3 was for the longest time just an industry show and it did that pretty well there's a lot of interesting stuff that happens just because you have so much of the games industry in the same place. One of my favorites are the couch interviews put on by Giantbomb. They get all sorts of names big and small to come and chat every night. That's the kind of thing a purely digital media strategy can't really replicate.

Not only that, but people will need new stay at home entertainment more than ever for a while.

Personal opinion, I don't think the potential consumer purchasers of the next-generation xbox or PS5 are going to be swayed one way or the other by anything that comes out of E3. Or even whether E3 exists or not.

Assuming both intend to ship for sales Christmas 2020, towards september/october of this year we're going to see a heavy marketing push with video trailers for the games they will launch with. Very similar to how Halo 3 was promoted with the launch of the Xbox 360.

> We look forward to bringing you E3 2021 as a reimagined event that brings fans, media, and the industry together in a showcase that celebrates the global video game industry.

Looks like the entire tech and game industries have put the future on hold for a year and a half.

Meanwhile, I suspect that Hollywood directors are scripting a COVID-19 film for box office success...

Yet the Smurf festival in Lombardy lives on https://twitter.com/chamILYAn/status/1237397658773286913?s=2...

As for the movie I think Contagion 2

Fake news with really bad taste given the current situation in Lombardy.

...why not just link the YouTube video? I don't get what the twitter link adds.

FYI the festival was in France.

Smurf festival in Landerneau, France. Not Lombardy.

I honestly think that this will be the death blow for E3 as a whole. It's been on the decline for many years, with multiple publishers having already pulled out in recent years. Simple truth is that it's outgrown what it used to be: a convention for tradespeople.

As long as animal crossing still come out on time, we can give up on the real world and just permanently live in the digital one.

If I were a streamer, I'd be extremely excited about the potential to get more viewers from people stuck at home.

As long as ISPs don't get caught with an unplanned capacity crunch.

It'd be like Snow Crash and Ready Player One in real life.

Have you seen the Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing memes? They crack me up. Same release day, so the Doom community started saying they just wanted Animal Crossing as a half-joke, and it escalated from there.

https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/24/21150803/animal-crossing-i...

I love it. Especially the video with Isabelle walking into gamestop and buying doom eternal while the doomguy buys animal crossing.

Aw. The best part of E3 was always the decor all the studios do to their booth. Hard to replicate that experience since it's very similar to visiting an art museum.

I wonder if the studios will just release the playable demos to the press now. The worst part of E3 was always waiting hours in line for a 5-minute demo experience. If they can digitally release the games, it'd be so much better.

E3 was never really setup or supposed to be a show for the public press rarely had to wait that long and mostly took appointments to see demos.

If I don't get Elden Ring news soon I am going to go hollow.

I only know of hollofication from Bleach. Does the idea crop up elsewhere, e.g. in Elden Ring?

It's a mechanic through all of the Dark Souls games, where when you die you go "hollow" until you restore your humanity

Dont go hollow skeleton! Yeah it's an idea from dark souls, another fromsoft game that you hopefully have heard of and spent 100s of hours playing.

Thanks for the tip about Dark Souls! Heard of it but never tried it out. I'll take a look.

You will either hate it or you will think whichever SoulsBourne game you play first is the pinnacle of gaming and you will play all of them and they will consume you and other games will cease to be fun. It is the curse.

Why don't they just do it over YouTube?

Good idea, but that would mean the game journalists wouldn't have anything to do.

Because they can't do interviews or ask questions? YT does have superchat which might be harnessed for that.

or in Fortnite, why not :)

Nintendo has been doing that for years.

What about WWDC?

I don't see any news about it yet but a cancellation seems likely considering the mass gathering ban in Santa Clara.

https://9to5mac.com/2020/03/10/wwdc-cancellation/

"Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2020 kicks off in June with an all-new online format"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22568601

Reply on news.ycombinator.com