E3 2007 - A Horse of A Different Color

Despite the smaller size and scope, there's still going to be a lot of games news coming down the pipe this week: the E3 Media and Business Summit 2007 kicks off soon. The big news starts with Microsoft's press conference on Tuesday, but already journalists are on the ground getting stories in order. E3 predictions are available from 1up and Gamespot's editorial team, while Eurogamer has a piece from their newsletter describing what's different about this year's E3. Not everyone is going this year that went last year because of those differences, and it will make for a wholly changed experience. "While a number of the publishers GameSpot contacted said they would consider participating in next year's E3 (some on the condition that the format is further tweaked), multiple representatives said they didn't believe there would be an E3 at all next year. Gamecock is even referencing that notion in its EIEIO event, which will cap off with a funeral service for the ESA's long-standing trade show. 'We're going to have some fun on the beach and say good-bye to the magical beast of yore that was E3,' Wilson said. 'I'd say there's a fair chance there won't be a show called E3 anything next year, which is why we're saying farewell to it on the beach. But I can't wait to see what emerges.'"

Re:My God

[Anonymous Coward]

A boring article will almost always attract off-topic comments. It wasn't helped by their choice of a bizarre metaphor in the title.

I found the horse comments quite amusing anyway, certainly more entertaining than talking about E3.

PAX

[Robber Tom]

Because of E3's idea to radically change itself, Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) in late August will be the largest video game convention this year. I think (or hope, since I'm going to PAX) that there will be some things saved for the bigger and public convention later...

Re:E3's failure

[alvinrod]

I don't think it's as bad as you make it out to be. In your own post you point out that if people are not at the show, they'll be just as able to watch some of the content or read about it on the internet. In fact, there was a lot of things at previous E3's that weren't shown to the public and the press weren't allowed to talk openly about. I'd read some of the reports released about which games were going to be making the biggest splashes and some of the journalists would drop names that I'd never heard of because they weren't out on the floor open to the general public to blog about.

With a drastic decrease in the number of non-journalists and small bloggers, I think that reporting will actually be better. Instead of having to wait four hours in line to get a hands on impression of Wii games, journalists might only have to wait an hour, giving them more time to look into other games and products, increasing the total amount of reporting that they can do. For me this results in more total information being put out that I can gobble up.

I think that this actually might help out smaller publishers because after a journalist has seen all of the main attractions from the key players in the industry, they'll have some time to check out some of the other games at the show. If you don't need to wait several hours in line to get fifteen minutes of Mario Galaxy for a preview, perhaps you can check out what a small publisher is putting out and do some reporting on that as well. Just because there aren't throngs of casual gamers and people not as connected to the industry, doesn't mean that the media won't be able to spot interesting projects from new or small companies. Many of these journalists are also avid gamers of sorts with varying intrest.

I think that the Penny Arcade Expo does a much better job by being entirely for the gamer who doesn't have anything to do for the industry. The fact that some of the major companies in the gaming industry have decided to attend the event suggest that it can do a good job of emulating the part of E3 which will no long exist. E3 started out as a trade show for the press, drifted away from that, and is now trying to move back towards that. As I received all of my E3 information from the media over the internet or in gaming magazines, I can't really say that this is a bad thing.