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E3 2007 A More 'Targeted' Event
simoniker writes "Following some rampant media speculation over the weekend, the ESA trade organization has released an official statement on the future of the E3 game trade show, revealing that it is not cancelled outright, but is rather 'evolving into a more intimate event focused on targeted, personalized meetings and activities.' E3 2007 will still take place in Los Angeles next year, according to the ESA's Doug Lowenstein, but 'will not feature the large trade show environment of previous years.'" Which is to say, it's not really E3 anymore.
You mean the point WASN'T to be a media orgy?
One of the reasons Will Wright released the first gameplay video of Spore at the Game Developer Conference 2006, instead of E3, was because he felt E3 was more like a commercial used by game producers to hype the games before it comes out, not a place for developers to exchange ideas and make better games.
Sad to see the end of an era, but the internet and RSS effectively take nearly all of the mystery, excitement, and suspense out of traveling to a computer trade show.
The only suspense left is related to unsubstantiated rumors, blurry prototype photos on blogger sites, and actualy press releases by companies.
I remember years ago how exciting the West Coast Computer Fair was -- small vendors trying to show off something special that you would otherwise never see or know about, then I remember Comdex - people coming from all over the world to unveil new products.
Nobody waits for a trade show now to unveil anything - everyone wants a jump on their competition, and consumers don't want to wait for information that they could be reading about in their RSS feed readers every day.
As a result, people feel less and less inclined to go to trade shows when they already know all there is to know about the PS3, the Wii, the Xbox 360's giant external power transformer, the new games, etc.
I remember the excitement of collecting vendor trinkets and carrying HUGE bags of product literature around for days on end. Who's going to do that now? I mean... maybe jot down a few urls in your PDA, but... traveling to collect BAGS of literature? That's so last century.
Exactly. The people who are upset that E3 is being changed are the people who made it untenable in the first place. E3 was intended to be an important business event, not the GenCon for video games that it has become.
The necessity of being a media circus has thrown the cost-benefit equation of E3 way off track. As a business event it was becoming less and less valuable because of the increasingly non-industry attendance, as a media event it was becoming less and less valuable because of the proliferation of other media channels (thanks Internet!), and it was continually getting more expensive. This change is good.
Would it matter? We are all too nerdish for them anyway. Just go to your local strip-bar instead. You'll get more attention and be able to do it for less dollar bills than it cost to get into E3 :)
If the past few years hasn't been a strong indicator, the Penny-Arcade Expo is now officially the only real place to be. Well, count me in!
Patience is a virtue, but haste is my life.
[Paraphrasing] EA complained that, "The cost of putting a pig in a nice enough dress that people forget it is a pig has been increasing year on year to the point where we just don't see we're getting a reasonable return on our investment."
Strangely, the companies with good games to actually show off, despite having a very small floor presence and minimal budgets somehow get plenty of press attention.
Crysis wasn't that big a booth (nor was Far Cry several years back). Dead Rising consisted of maybe four consoles and no one to talk it up. Half Life 2 was a single small room. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, a couple of years back, was a few GameCubes, some weird controllers and one girl trying to explain it to confused people. Guitar Hero was a relatively small setup too. Every one of those titles gained huge coverage because, shockingly, they relied on simply being good.
EA has about a third of the gaming market sewn up and is very profitable because it has realized the same thing the movie industry has: Make 20% profits on lots of safe investments and you'll be far better off than someone who makes 1000% on one title and has ten others fail. It's a great business model but ultimately means you put out a boring product that no amount of dressing it up is going really excite journalists who're looking for something sensational.
As such, yeah, no amount of spending will get a good return at E3 compared to the small companies that have their one really exciting release. The little companies will never need a big booth and the creme-de-la-creme of LA's strippers to get people's interest. For EA, it makes absolute sense to move to a private demo where you fly journalists in, competing against no one else, and then let the small guys starve in a world with no centralized tradeshow that journalists will be at and they're too small to pay to fly them in for one-on-ones.
For the EA business model of large quantities of predictable over taking risks, E3 was at best a waste of money and at worst a way to help the competition.
Not knocking EA per se. Other large publishers have reached similar conclusions just as the movie industry, music industry and even the book publishing industry have. I just picked EA because they're so much larger than anyone else (largely because of having been smart enough, even if we hate the reality of it, to realize this before most others).
The sad truth is, E3 was great for gamers as it rewarded small companies with great games vastly more than giants with solid but repetetive ones. As the giants have the money, its death was kind of inevitable.