The Entertainment Software Association announced Monday that the gigantic circus of video game fun that is E3 is no more. The are now going to evolve to a more intimate event focused on targeted, personalized meetings and activities." This change was mostly driven by top game makers not liking the millions of dollars they spend every year on the event, money they feel could be better spent elsewhere (I suspect on executive bonuses).
The complaints are valid. E3 is an enormous affair of lots of noise and fanfare. Products get lost, annoucements quickly forgotten, and the spotlight shifts constantly which can be really annoying if your the big three annoucing the next big thing. Sometimes the gems get lost for this reason. Yet sometimes the gems get discovered for this same reason. The press gets overwhelmed. The goal sometimes failed. Simply put, E3 did become too big. The complaints are valid.
However, this "intimate" affair, at the behest of the big companies, does not seem to be the best solution. They are over correcting the problem, possibly to extinction. Right now, the plans for the new E3, now called E3 Media Festival are up in the air. How will the meetings be handled? How big? Who is invited? Who is not invited? How will the large companies be handled versus the small companies? Will the small companies even get a chance? What impact will this have on sales and the early buzz that E3 generates for games? Will E3 become extinct as a result. Thanks to E3, Nintendo once become king of the console wars in buzz, when before everyone was thinking "wtf is a Wii?!?". Can this kind of turnaround still happen?
It seems the complaints are less about money and more about being stingy. The big companies, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, EA, etc, don't want to share the spotlight. They want it all to themselves and with the previous E3 coverage, they often had to share it with everyone, big and small. The playing field, at least for most participants, was mostly level. An example is Spore. Its the little game that could. Just based on a booth and a demo conference, it was the talk of many journalists and blogs. I doubt that sat well with executives. With this new E3, why should the companies even participate? Where is the value?
E3 was a weekend long event like the San Diego Comic Con. They are now taking away what made it such an event. In turn they are taking away why its news. Where is the incentive for media companies to commit resources and personnel to cover the Expo, excuse the Festival? Seems like with this new plan, they can send a few AP reporters, let them file their reports and editors can use them if they want. Must cheaper then sending a report like they use to.
I think the real failure is with ESA and the very complainers they are attempting to appease. They responsible for E3 becoming so unmanageable. They are the ones that started the booth wars and the conference wars. If the big companies had managed their budgets, if ESA had created booth restrictions and guidelines, this situation would never had occurred. Instead they let them run rampant, with it escalating year after year until finally they decided to do what sounds like a poorly thought out reset.
I think E3 is now on its death bed and doesn't even know it. At this point, there is simply no reason for retailers to send their reps, the media to report on it and the big companies to spend time on it when they can all get the same results with a simple press conference for a fraction of the cost.
I guess we will all find in the next few years starting in July 2007 when 5,000 of the invited meet at some Los Angeles hotel to have their "intimate [non-]event".
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