| E3 Cancelled… Err, Downsized… Err, Renamed… Err… |
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| Written by Chase | |
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News came late last week that E3 was being S-Canned by the ESA - the good folks that, for the past 12 years, have delivered Christmas to gamers in May every year with the sprawling expo. The media overstepped their bounds, it seems. A formal announcement wasn’t made on the subject until yesterday. E3 isn’t being cancelled, but will be severely downsized and renamed. The “E3 Media Festival” as it will now be called will be held in July from now on, to accommodate for publishers and developers that had trouble getting demos ready in May for games that wouldn’t see retail until Christmas. It will not take place in the Los Angeles Convention Center, but in a hotel or two in the downtown area. It will be invite-only, dropping the attendance from 60,000 this year to around 5-10,000. This is bittersweet. We’ll still get all the news we want, though not necessarily at the same time. The ESA is unable to confirm how many companies will strut their stuff at the redesigned expo. Companies will be free from spending tons of time and money on E3 booths and demos of their games, giving them more time and money to invest in their product. This will hopefully translate to more games for us. However, we’ll miss the spectacle. Having been to E3 I can tell you that it’s a very impressive display of money, if nothing else (pictures do it justice. E3 sucks aside from the awe-inspiring size of the event). We’ll still get to see the games in due time, but we’re losing the lights, the booths, the babes, and the gargantuan size of the event. Clicky clicky for an interview with Doug Lowenstein, head honcho of the ESA, and smart dude. It’s an interesting read, if only because D.L. gives responses that are far more coherent, less showy, and frankly better than most companies in the industry he represents. |
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