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Gen Con To Take the Place of E3?

Posted by Zonk on Tue Aug 08, 2006 10:56 PM
from the oh-my-precious-brain dept.
E3 Entertainment Games
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.
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[+] Gen Con 2006 in a Nutshell 89 comments
Another year, another trip into the heart of dorkness. Gen Con Indy 2006 was marked, not so much by the big releases (because there weren't that many this year), but by changes in the wind. Several newer systems were in their second year, garnering praise for their continued quality. Some games that we saw last year weren't even around this year. Others were just not doing as well as their creators would have hoped. The focus, though, was entirely on the games ... and next year's convention. The talk in the halls and on the exhibit hall floor, when not about dice and mechanics, surrounded what Gen Con will be like next year and the changes that videogames will bring to the event. Read on for my comments about what I saw this year, what worked, what didn't, and a few words on what might result from next year's changes.
[+] GenCon SoCal Throws In the Towel 36 comments
The official GenCon website is hosting the official press release with the news: the West coast GenCon is no more. Citing 'competing shows' in the Southern California area, the RPG convention is closing up shop so that staff can focus on the Midwestern/East Coast Flagship event GenCon Indy. In an open letter from Peter Adkinson, he states how much he regrets this decision, and describes the four years of the event as well as the decision-making that led to this state of affairs. In his long discussion of the event, he downplays the attempt to merge with the IDG event and the inclusion of videogames into the GenCon formula. Though it's not listed as a root cause, the death of E3 would seem to be having a ripple effect here as well. He makes sure to point out that GenCon Indy isn't going anywhere, and that this year's 40th anniversary should be an interesting one.
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Gen Con To Take the Place of E3? 25 Comments More /

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  • Can't see that happening. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ShadowBlasko (597519) * on Tuesday August 08 2006, @11:04PM (#15871382) Homepage
    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.
    • The problem I see is that GenCon has always been geared towards publishers AND consumers. E3 was always suposed to be for publishers, and become more and more bloated as more and more consumers attended.

      I do find it interesting though that there is enough market demand to make someone/anyone host a new E3.

      -Rick
  • when the news about E3's changes first broke, everyone went on about how big, expensive and ultimately how little benefit the event offered. this sounds like the first steps to building up another such event. i guess whatever works for some.

  • booth babes (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Edward Kmett (123105) on Tuesday August 08 2006, @11:27PM (#15871450) Homepage
    Gen Con gets booth babes?
    • I knew E3 would die when I heard that they stopped allowing booth babes.
    • There have already been booth babes there, at least in the past. I haven't attended since it moved to Indy so I can't speak for the past couple years. Some were at the video and computer game booths, but there were some at other booths also. E3 did seem to have much better ones though.

    • Re:booth babes (Score:4, Funny)

      by Macgrrl (762836) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @12:42AM (#15871648)

      Please, god, NOOOO!!!!!!!

      It could only result in a mass wave of strokes and heart attacks as table top gamers encounter women who aren't Furries, WW groupies, game geeks or immediate family members. They won't know how to cope.

      • ...on both sides, as the console-gaming boothies get their first real exposure to 'pong' -- and not the electronic one...
        • What proper booth babe hasn't played beer pong at some point in her life? Come now.
          • *sigh* 'Pong' is a British slang term for a bad smell or stench, or the act of stinking -- referring to the GenCon attendees, sometimes known as (in a more literal sense than the apellation is usually meant) 'The Great Unwashed'.
    • There are already booth babes at GenCon. And I do not mean the women walking around in skimpy chain mail shirts who have no business revealing that much skin.

      I remember last year there being some card game that reminded me of Leisure Suit Larry is CCG form, and they had about 3-5 (hard to tell because they were spread out) very attractive women in revealing clothing walking around the main exhibition hall handing out flyers/samples. And they werent the only ones.

      But as a whole they are very sparse at the

  • for an unspecified 2007 date

    It would be really strange if the new big show (dare I say "e3 killer"?) was at a time other than the traditional spring. For instance, if it was during the end of summer/early fall, imagine how long the advertising ramp-up for Christmas would be.

    Geez. And you thought Christmas started too early already...

  • Forget Los Angeles... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by creimer (824291) on Tuesday August 08 2006, @11:36PM (#15871470) Homepage
    They should move it to Las Vegas [adultenter...ntexpo.com]. 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
  • 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?

    ComiCon (in San Diego, Chicago, and everywhere else) have absorbed the media presence, so the original supporters of GenCon might be all right ... but World of Warcraft is even better crack than Magic: The Gathering.

    • 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?

      Wouldn't there be a certain irony to that? Isn't that what the RPG industry did to the poor war games inductry back in the 1970's?

      • I think the biggest concern in the short run would be Gen-Con's relative openness compared to E3 and other video game industry conventions, which are ostensibly supposed to be difficult for the great unwashed to get into.

        Were you trying to set someone up for a joke?
        Come on, you had to have seen the jokes about the unwashed at game conventions looming on the horizon when you wrote that.

  • Big mistake (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JFMulder (59706) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:22AM (#15872347)
    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."
  • Take one under-airconditioned gaming convention stuffed full of prepubescent boys (and immature men) for whom Xena (or Gabriella, or Callisto, depending on your particular fetish) is their idyllic archetype of femininity.
    Add one electronic gaming convention, famous for its babealicious flesh-pottery and heedlessness of social convention in order to market its products.

    It's going to be like ... nerd-vana.

    At least you've got decent odds that you'd have a Gen Con where the attendees *maybe* took a shower, if o
  • So let me get this straight... E3 is getting slashed down to almost nothing because the game companies were sick of spending lots of time and money getting ready to preview products at a massive convention, or at least that's what I took out of the news stories circulating last week. So now the Gen Con organizers want to relocate the show to the LA convention center and try selling the extra space to video companies that have already made it clear they don't want to do conventions? Someone over at Gen Con i
    • 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.

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