E3’s Organizers Are Back With a New Event. This Time, Doctors Are Invited Too

The organizers of the extravagant E3 games conference pronounced the event dead in 2023. Attendance for the bombastic, news-packed trade show was on the decline in 2019, and after the Covid-19 lockdown, the organizers at the Entertainment Software Association held one more virtual-only show in 2021 before yanking the plug.

Now, the ESA is ready to move on with a new, vaguely described event called the Interactive Innovation Conference, dubbed “iicon.” Big game developers such as Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and more are already confirmed for the show.

But ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis wants to make one thing clear: “This is not the new E3,” he tells WIRED.

Set to take place in April 2026 in Las Vegas, iicon will not be a trade show for game announcements, Pierre-Louis says. Nor will it be a consumer show with demos or a forum to talk about game development. He says there are already events “that do all those things very well.”

Instead, with iicon, the ESA hopes to bridge the gap between the many industries being shaped by advances in video games, from film and music to health care and education.