Do Trade Shows Benefit Gamers?

Thanks to The Adrenaline Vault for its article discussing the actual significance of videogame trade shows, now that "e-mail, Internet press releases, cell phones, faxes, personal digital assistants and the like make communication and transmission of information virtually instantaneous among developers and vendors." The piece makes the suggestion, with regard to "trade shows like Comdex, CES and E3", that: "In earlier days, people were attracted to attend the national conventions because of all the novelty present. Now, new software and hardware products seem more evolutionary than revolutionary, with a lot of copycat items that differ from what is already out there just through cosmetic differentiation." Do shows like E3 matter as much as they used to?

Does it matter?

[MMaestro]

In a nutshell, no. Does it matter in terms of convincing major retailers or stockholders whether to support a company? Yes. Does it matter to gamers who will never attend E3, will have to read 3 different sources to get all the info, and will have to surf 4 different websites for different video clips? No.

E3 used to be all about 'the games for gamers' but between Sony's move to make video game consoles the center of entertainment systems and the 'maturity' of gamers (thats debateable), E3 turned into an endless mass of unsorted, mostly behind closed doors media event.

I don't know about those shows...

[EvilJohn]

... but our show does. It's why we do it, for gamers.

http://www.quakecon.org/ [quakecon.org]

No they dont.

[carndearg]

For most of the 1990s I and my employers made the yearly pilgrimage to ECTS [ects.com], the UK's main games industry trade show.

I've never been to E3 etc so I can only speak for ECTS, but in this case it is strictly a trade show. I'm sure some enthusiasts manage to get tickets, in fact one year I got myself a press pass by claiming to report for a games news web site(Mmm, free coffee and biscuits..:), but this is the exception not the rule. This could be affected by the kind of companies I worked for but in my view ECTS was more about narcisistic industry management showing off than doing business itself.

Re:The advent of the internet

[c3k]

Not to mention the trend over the past 2-3 years of gamers themselves actively discussing what they think will happen/what they want to see/what they're looking forward to hearing about during and after each E3. Following E3 2003, I saw a high instance of gamers online discussing what they've seen and what was reported. This year, I saw a high instance of those same gamers anticipating what games (and industry trends - as they related to consumer products such as Xbox 2) they were going to learn about from E3 2004. Therefore, I think as E3 continues, while the show may not be particularly consumer oriented, the publics response will treat it as a consumer show.