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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.
Hopefully this "intimate" event will improve the signal-to-noise ratio, which has been pretty atrocious recently. It may also spur more companies to run their own events just for their legions of fans... you know, like BlizzCon.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
What is E3? Is it just a convention, a convenient vehicle for putting developers in the same room as producers and distributors? Or is it...a spectacle, a chance to throw out some massive hype and drum up interest in upcoming games?
Please, that's not even a question. E3 may have started out as a business-oriented conference, but the name "E3" is now completely associated with booth babes, demos, drool, web comics, vaporware, and Sony press releases of Epic proportions (Forgive the pun...). E3 is dead, this announcement notwithstanding. It's also a clear example of the Theseus paradox, but that's not really relevant.
Goodbye, ridiculously endearing media event. Hello...business thing.
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.
... a more intimate event focused on targeted, personalized meetings and activities.
So the booth babes are being replaced by hookers?
All they're gonna do is make it a "closed door" meeting by charging $3k for a press pass. The entry fee will keep most of the autograph-seeking kiddies away while allowing all the media coverage of the old show and making a tidy profit to boot.
E3 has not always been open to the public, either. Only in the past couple years have they started selling general admission tickets, though it was never hard to get a press pass if you had even a moderately popular web site.
I bet the ESA looked at the industry and realized that because of consolidation and an off-year for consoles there are only a few big players left who can afford to support E3, and they're already throwing their own events.
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.
The outright death of E3 would probably be the best thing to happen to game development teams. E3 costs us tons of time each year -- the event itself takes up a lot of our time, but so does preparing for it and recovering from it. E3 dictates ship schedules and major milestones and sometimes even the ultimate fate of entire projects or even studios. The whole show is all about the hype and not about the substance.
Of course the perspective of a marketing persion will be the opposite of that of a developer. But I think that marketing departments are half the problem with the industry -- the drive has become one to create guaranteed sellers using big IP licenses and tired old game formats rather than to create excellent products that sell on their own merits.
Did the Department of Redundancy Department make up that name?
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
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.
With E3 imploding, the games indutry is losing its biggest attention-grabbing showpiece.
Ya, it kinda deviated from its original intention as a trade show, but it became sort of a "Cannes" of videogames.
If you don't know what the Cannes Film Festival is, it's an annual international film festival (obviously) in the city of Cannes, France. The most important film festival in the world. It's filled to the brim with celebrities, and is a favourite venue for famous directors to debut their newest film.
E3, in recent years, started to emulate this festival in certain ways. In a more plasticky, american way, of course.
The internet may be the most efficient way of putting-out press releases, trailers and screenshots, but the games industry NEEDS a flashy annual event. (And I'm certain many of you will be quite vocal in your disagreement with this.)
Does it make you happy you're so strange?