Are you kidding? Sony's press conferences were infamously corporate, half the reason their 06 was so bad is that it was a glorified investor's conference, being half powerpoints of sales figures and other boring shit.
This was intentional, E3
was a corporate show. It began life as a trade show so game companies could show retailers and journalists what they had cooking up for the holiday season, since that is when most big games released back in the day. They were originally just using CES for that purpose but as gaming grew through the 90s they wanted their own show.
Sony wasn't the only one who had boring presentations like that too, go look at the early recorded Nintendo presentations. It's mostly just pie charts, sales data, and demographics. Very long and dry presentations.
Things changed because the internet made it easier for normal people to watch all this stuff and they found it boring. So there was a slow shift to make it a more consumer focused show. Problem is though E3 was always very expensive for booth space and as time went on more and more game companies realized it was completely pointless. You had cheaper alternatives popping up in the 2000s, like PAX, and the internet became something everyone had so it was easier than ever to get info out there.
That is why Nintendo stopped doing live stage shows and switched to the Nintendo Direct format. There was no point in paying literally millions of dollars for something they could record in-house and just throw on youtube.
tldr being though that you are right essentially, E3 did not die because it became too corporate. It died because it stopped being corporate and became a way too expensive consumer focused show.
We're rapidly circling the drain for a 1980s style game industry crash
We're not and anyone who says this doesn't know their history. The 80s gaming crash mostly happened because supply was way higher than demand. Way too many companies trying to make their own home console and way too many games being made. You didn't even need to license back then, anyone could just make anything and it literally flooded the market. Most the games were trash, yes, but even if they were high quality there would have been a crash because the overall market was incredibly tiny back then.
Like for reference the Atari 2600 was the juggernaut of its time but it took them over a decade to sell 30 million consoles worldwide. That is a worse pace than the Xbox Series X|S is doing right now, and the Series flopped so hard it's turned Microsoft into a third party publisher.
More importantly though gaming just makes a shit load of money, billions upon billions each year. The idea that it's all going to come crashing down is crazy when you see how well games are still selling. Especially in the indie and AA space. A highly specific example of what I mean is something like Dynasty Warriors Origins from earlier this year. Probably something most people here did not play but it was a huge success. It sold in 1 week what Koei Tecmo was expecting it to sell in its first year. People are hungry for good games and are more than willing to buy them. Same reason something like Clair Obscur is doing so well right now too.
The only thing circling the drain right now is Western AAA companies because their shift to DEI lowered their potential audience and they never bothered to adjust their budgets to match this new smaller audience. They're making games that need to sell 5 or 6 million copies but do not appeal to that many people. A lot of them won't make it through all this in their current form (see Ubisoft as the best example) but there isn't going to be some grand collapse of the entire market because a few of these companies go under.
The industry will just move on, same as it always has. Very few of the biggest developers from the 80s, 90s, or early 2000s are still around in their original form. The same thing is happening to modern companies who can't adapt, they will be wiped out and replaced just as they replaced other companies that came before them.
