CES 2022 show floor
CES 2022 show floor was quite forgettable.
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CES 2022 attendance fell 73% to 45K from 2020 numbers. Was it worth it?

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 4 min

CES 2022‘s attendance numbers were battered by the Omicron variant of COVID, with numbers hitting 45,000 attendees and 2,300 exhibitors.

The numbers are down from 171,000 attendees and 4,400 exhibitors at the last in-person event in January 2020, according to the Consumer Technology Association, the trade group that puts on the show in Las Vegas. There were 1,800 media, but for the first time in decades I was not among them.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.