Next Generation: EXCLUSIVE! MUST CREDIT DRUDGE REPORT! E3 IS HISTORY!
Ars Technica: Uh, it’s not cancelled, just… uh… downsized. Yeah. We’ll get back to you.
Edit: It’s official.\’c2\~
My thoughts:
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- If we do have E3, can we have it somewhere besides Los Angeles, please? I mean, there’s this other city just right there, with plenty of hotel space.
- I can actually see the trade shows segmenting, and this being good for the industry as a whole. Developer meet and greets (GDC, AGC), trade shows focused on a particular industry segment (AGC again, for MMOs), and events for the general public (GenCon, Pax, ComicCon). The industry is too large now for one-show-to-rule-them-all-and-in-the-darkness-bind-them.
- As someone who’s worked at several E3s, the experience for those who actually have to get work done has devolved, year after year, into something akin to a – very loud – pit of hell, with ravenous hordes of post-teen fanboys seeking what trinkets they may devour.
- And as someone who’s worked at game companies for the past few years, witnessing the effort that goes into what are frequently smoke-and-mirrors displays, for the benefit, more often than not, of impressing competitors who are also sleepless from coming up with their own smoke-and-mirrors displays, seeing that fall by the wayside would not be a bad thing.
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Of course, if you believe the PR people, it’s all the fault of those nasty bloggers. From the Ars Technica story:
One source I spoke with told me that media access is indeed a problem, but it probably does not factor in greatly to the decision to downsize the show. Nevertheless, there are plenty of complaints from insiders about how “blogging” in particular has made the shows more difficult, if only because floor people are instructed to speak only of what they are approved to speak of, lest another half-baked headline make the rounds.
Damn those interlopers and their calculating machines!
#1 by Apache on July 30th, 2006
I’d really love it to be in Las Vegas. Every time I go to LA, I get sick from the smog.
#2 by Psychochild on July 30th, 2006
Two words: Good riddance.
I’ve never had to work the dev side of things, but I’ve been there as an attendee and as a semi-pretend journalist. But, I’ve never been all that excited about E3. Maybe it’s my natural introverted tendencies, but this show is just tiresome. As the articles Scott linked above point out, the really interesting stuff happens behind closed doors. I don’t have a big name or a big name developer behind me to impress people, so I never got into the exclusive stuff. I haven’t been one for drunken debauchery and a lack of sleep since college, so the nighttime festivities didn’t get me all excited, either. It also seemed to be a tremendous waste as companies threw the equivalent of multiple independent game development budgets (hell, maybe even the equivalent of one big-time development budget) into a display that was really impressing no one besides the rubes that didn’t belong there in the first place.
The issue becomes, where will people go for the “biz” side of things? Will the GDC take over that role? Perhaps the AGC will become the magnet for that for online games? Or, maybe the “scaled back” E3 will be a good place to go to get business done.
Time to see if the rumors are substantiated.
#3 by Matt Mihaly on July 30th, 2006
I’m with Brian. The only people E3 impresses are people who have no business being there in the first place. I was in LA for games-related business during it this year, but stayed well away from the convention center and its useless over-the-topness.
–matt
#4 by Dave Rickey on July 30th, 2006
I didn’t even bother to go to the last one, and had no plans to ever attend again. Too loud, everyone it might be useful to talk to is too busy, and to actually exhibit was getting prohibitively expensive, even Kentia Hall and off-concourse private meeting rooms were over-priced for independants this last year from what I was told.. Other than the after-hours schmoozing, it’s a complete waste of time.
I don’t even want to think about what a total hell actually *working* the showfloor was. I did it twice, and the first year Mythic went was horrendous (we were right next to the MadCatz booth, listening to some c-list celebrity with a recurring role on Xena try to give play-by-play for a Quake tournament at about 85dbA). By the third day I couldn’t even hear myself talk. And every time I went, I got home and spent a week recovering from some version of the Plague.
If the major exhibitors and their $20M+ booths go away, maybe the medium-sized ones won’t feel it neccessary to line up wall-to-wall booth-babes to draw attention (assuming it really is just restructuring to something smaller and less of a circus). And maybe, just maybe, something besides blitzing the senses of the retail clerks can happen.
Myself, I’ll wait out another year.
–Dave
#5 by Mist on July 30th, 2006
It seems MMO companies especially spend a long time working on their E3 demos, taking away nearly a month of live team support from their product every year. E3 going away would be good, at least for MMO players.
#6 by Aufero on July 30th, 2006
Good. E3 has been a massive and pointless waste of time for at least the last five years. Apparently somebody noticed.
#7 by J. on July 31st, 2006
Just bring back the Promised Lot, bitches.
#8 by Moorgard on July 31st, 2006
E3 is a debacle, for all the reasons mentioned above.
And yet, if it changed a whole lot, part of me would miss it. Or at least the free booze.
#9 by SirBruce on July 31st, 2006
I would agree that E3 was getting too big and too much of a marketing event; I was getting better discussions at AGC and GDC. But, I still liked E3 because it was one place I could go and get hands-on with all the upcoming MMOGs. Now, I’ll have to wait for the alpha/beta for each product, or the company-specific preview event, and hope I’m an important enough journalist to get invited. Sure, such events may be cheaper, but it also means less exposure. If Funcom had to throw their Age of Conan event in Oslo, would it have gotten anywhere near to glowing previews it did in the American press after E3?
#10 by Jessica Mulligan on July 31st, 2006
I don’t even bother with the show floor anymore. Even if I want to talk to someone about their product, it is impossible to hear anything or hold a conversation (although China Joy in Shanghai has the noise level beat by a mile. You need to be able to read lips to be on the show floor here and entrepreneurs clean up by selling ear plugs. I kid you not). And as has been noted, business meetings of any note rarely take place on the floor anymore; every meeting room in the hall is now booked for that purpose, including the important retailer/publisher meetings to show product for the upcoming Christmas selling season. I’m not sure what purpose the exhibition floor serves anymore.
If we’re going to keep it, tightening up the entrance requirements – and actually enforcing them to keep out the people who have no business being at an industry trade event and make it damn near impossible to move around and look at the small and medium companies – would be a damn good thing.
#11 by Freakazoid on July 31st, 2006
I suppose everyone wants the next new shiny convention to be closest to them. I hope it’s Pax. It’s only an hour drive at most for me.
btw Lum, I added some stuff to your wiki entry yesterday. Some douche was complaining about context in the talk page.
#12 by SirBruce on July 31st, 2006
Lum’s wiki was/is in desperate need of clean-up and reorganization to conform to wiki standards. Frankly I’m surprised the original version lasted as long as it did.
#13 by Freakazoid on July 31st, 2006
It’s not like Lum’s entry is completely dishoveled. Maybe an insult to anyone with college writing experience, but Wikipedia is not taken that seriously anyway. Besides, I think Rasputin might’ve had a hand in keeping it. He’s an admin there.
#14 by Apache on July 31st, 2006
E3 is fun. Well, it should be fun. If you aren’t having fun, you aren’t having a proper E3 experience.
#15 by xaldin on July 31st, 2006
Never gone to an E3 myself. I do however enjoy the pictures from it. I’d miss the pictures and the horror stories about what went wrong from various folks.
#16 by Jason on July 31st, 2006
I used to love going to E3 back when it was in Atlanta.
#17 by Jason Ballew on July 31st, 2006
I’m all for E3 being scaled back, and being made more for…y’know…the press and industry as opposed to every jackass who works for Best Buy and GamestopEB.
Of course, if things keep going like they are, and I hope they do….the next show I attend will be Tokyo Game Show. Go fig.
#18 by Georgia on July 31st, 2006
I have noticed over the years that E3 has kind of deteriorated in terms of its quality. It’s all about who has the loudest, shiniest, skankiest booth there. It just isn’t impressive to me if a game’s only way of promoting itself is to line its booth with a lot of skank, loud music, and lights flickering fast enough to give me a seizure.
I had to work the floor once, and it was so loud I couldn’t even hear myself think half of the time… my voice was shot after the first day… GAH. Sucks.
I will miss seeing people that I know in the industry. Scott, I’ll probably never lay eyes on you again since you’re in Texas now
E3 was my only way to keep in touch with friends in the industry.
I was looking forward to E3 this coming year just to see what the Warhammer setup would be and help promote the game, but I guess I’ll have to try to latch onto a smaller ride for that.
#19 by Lophat on July 31st, 2006
I’m not sure why you would even have booths at an industry event. Most trade shows are companies who are trying to sell things to each other (for closed events) or to the general public. Most game companies do not fall into the former category, and if E3 is really supposed to be a closed event (i.e., no unwashed masses), booths are just pointless. If the goal is to do demos for the press, it seems like a show floor is a poor venue, for all of the reasons everyone else has listed. E3 seems to lack any sort of utility or focus. AGC-style events seem like a useful industry-talks-to-itself sort of thing, while PAX or Comic-Con seem like better choices for reaching a mass market audience (for example, Mythic’s tiny Warhammer booth was pretty crowded at this year’s comic-con, and yet I was able to hear Sanya talk to a bunch of us and show of the core mechanics). If E3 does continue, maybe it should be run by and for industry consultant-types who want to drum up business for their firms (such as the PARC folks).
#20 by D-0ne on July 31st, 2006
Four words.
Booth Babes are easy.
Save the Booth Babes.
#21 by SirBruce on July 31st, 2006
E3 is also a great way for me to get a feel for the “buzz” of a certain game, beyond the message board crowds and the developers themselves. I can meet with gamers, retailers, publishers, other press, etc. I can see what games people are playing, what games people come away with a positive experience from, etc. E3 certainly made my media job “easier” despite its well-discussed shortcomings. Maybe the rumor was just a “trial balloon”?
#22 by Dave Rickey on July 31st, 2006
Nope, it’s been confirmed (check the edit at the top of the story). Reading between the lines, the console manufacturers all decided to pull out and took some of the major publishers with them, which would represent more than 2/3 of the showfloor and probably 90% of the money. So it wasn’t a matter of *whether* the next E3 would be a tiny shadow of the sensoria-blowing spectacle we’ve grown to know and hate, but how it would be spun.
Me and Scott were talking about how expensive it was to get noticed at E3 at AGC, and came up with a few better ways to spend that kind of money, if your purpose was to get as much attention as possible:
1) Hire a few supermodels, put them in a big lucite box in Kentia Hall, and have them feed 20 dollar bills to a shredder for the entirety of the show.
2) Alternatively, hire a few hundred strippers and have them walk around giving attendees a lap dance while wearing a thong and bikini top with the game logo on them. Promised Lot without the lot.
3) Charter a medium-sized passenger jet and fly attendees to a Nevada brothel.
If it’s a race to the bottom, why not go straight to the finish line?
When you consider that entire games can be funded for what has been getting spent on the booths (not even the larger ones), and that you could fly every journalist and buyer first class to an event of your own for less, and this was inevitable.
This won’t be good for the mid-level developers that aren’t in MMO’s, but they were on their way out, anyway. The small ones had already been squeezed out.
–Dave
#23 by Linoleum on July 31st, 2006
I don’t think Vegas was ever an option, I thought the convention center was pretty much booked up through 2010 or so…
#24 by Brat on July 31st, 2006
Hey Scott…
Gratz on being slashdotted…
Brat
#25 by Chris Mancil on July 31st, 2006
I hope GDC is next =)
I know its still an ‘ok’ show, but it too has become a money grab that delivers lower and lower returns each year.
Thank God for Austin Game Conference.
#26 by SirBruce on July 31st, 2006
Actually, no it wasn’t confirmed… the rumor was actually pretty well dashed, and instead we got the confirmation of “downsize”, which was something that had already been rumored a month ago.
As to the efficacy of the marketing, well, it’s hard to say, but you’re right that there can be cheaper ways of doing things. The guy who runs Mile High Comics used to say that he rarely wanted to do promotional events at comic book stores, like having an artist come in to sign stuff or whatever, if it cost more than “beer and a t-shirt”, because he could easily pack the stores with interested customers with the latter. I don’t know if he was including the liquor license, though.