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Gen Con To Take the Place of E3?
Venues like PAX, Tokyo Game Show, and GDC are taking stock in the wake of E3's 'demise', and coming to terms with what this will mean next year. Gamasutra reports that another trade show is stepping up the the plate: Gen Con. From the article: "In order to better accommodate the video game business into its existing shows, Gen Con organizers plan to expand its venue space at the Indianapolis show in 2007. An additional 43,000 square feet will be added to the exhibit hall with additional space expanding into area hotels as well to accommodate the thousands of games taking place over the four-day event. In addition, Gen Con So Cal, the companies' show traditionally held in Anaheim, will be moved to the Los Angeles Convention Center, the former site of the annual E3 trade show, for an unspecified 2007 date, and will attempt to attract further video game companies to exhibit alongside the traditional paper-gaming and CCG Gen Con stalwarts. 'When the news came out about the drastic changes at E3, we began to hear from some industry players about Gen Con increasing its capabilities to better accommodate the industry,' said Peter Adkison, CEO of Gen Con, LLC." This is truly surreal.
I just don't think GenCon has the infrastructure... But it would be cool to see.
Gas prices being what they are, and budgets being crunched, I think you will see a lot of shows combining in the near future.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
Gen Con gets booth babes?
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
But it also means minus the hype..the buzz..the sitting around watching video game news for a week. For as much of a pain in the ass the fanboys might be if it werent for them no one would give a flip about E3. The only thing that scaling back E3 is going to accomplish in the long run is ensure that small developers have a harder time getting their games published and bigger companies can freely continue to shovel out crap. E3 has always been about hype and press, yes deals occasionally got made but even most of those were the results of the buzz.
They should move it to Las Vegas. Isn't that much different from E3, except some of the games are very different.
What the video/computer game industry needs is something like comic con that is geared toward the gamers and fans and everyone else who was going to E3 but wasn't actually there for the original reasons of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which was more for companies and journalists than the fan base that was growing up around it.
How cool would it be if the companies could all get together and set up something like a mega-arcade that operated on a semi-permanent nature where new games and companies could use it for publicity, etc...
I worry more about the already laboring tabletop RPG and CCG markets. How long before they get pushed to the edges of the floor, or segregated into their own smaller room? Two years? One year? Five seconds?
... but World of Warcraft is even better crack than Magic: The Gathering.
ComiCon (in San Diego, Chicago, and everywhere else) have absorbed the media presence, so the original supporters of GenCon might be all right
Why would anyone want to become the next E3? The ESA said it themselves, the members themselves decided unanimously that E3 was too big and cost too much. Those are the same people who are going to look at Gen Con and say : "You know guys, there's a reason why E3 is dead. We won't take part in your E3-wanna be project. It just costs too much."