arstechnica.com — Hotel suites, invite-only meetings, and a airport hangar. No, it's not Dr. Dre's next video shoot, it's the new E3. The new show will be rechristened as the E3 Media and Business Summit when it takes place from July 11-13 in Santa Monica, California, next year.
Oct 15, 2006 View in Crawl 4
lososaurusOct 16, 2006
1 word: WEAK!
pennyfan87Oct 16, 2006
this still doesn't beat Spectacle Fest 2008www.spectaclefest.com
akinderOct 16, 2006
I can see from the negative diggs that noone understood what I was trying to get across.The free publicity was great, but only certain people understand things like that. You can imagine the PR people trying to explain to the guys with the purse strings that "well, we spend $150,000 on E3 and we get all these blog postings and more people know about it." The first thing the exec is going to ask is, where is the on paper / in a pretty powerpoint graph that shows the exact return?I'm not saying E3 is better because of the change, it really disappoints me because I was wanting to go next year.
frecklefootOct 16, 2006
Well, I liked E3 (first time I saw a video clip on The Sims and got all excited about it), it was a lot of fun. But, except for that one video clip I saw, I didn't see the point. Booth babes, flashing lights, contests for T-shirts... it just seemed like a lot of money spent over nothing. But I wasn't one of the people placing orders for games for Christmas either: I was just demo-ing my company's latest game.I only had to spend a couple of hours in the booth, so I got a lot of time to walk around and see things. I did think it was fun, but kind of pointless: "Ooo! Blizzard is coming out with Diablo 2." But I already knew that (forget about trying to play it--line longer than the Mississippi). "Sega's Dreamcast is out!" But I already knew that too. "Come play in this cool VR vehicle!" Fun, but, what, are you going to try and sell that to consumers?The big point here is that E3 was supposed to be for the media, generate buzz for upcoming games. But it turned into a circus because a lot of non-media people (like me in '99) come along and just create hassles and show floor congestion.The other big thing is that game developers spent a lot of time and money developing a demo for E3. Typically, a few months before E3, the developer would spin-off a version of the source code from the common baseline to develop the demo. Several developers would work on it, fixing partial features here, disabling others there, fixing graphic glitches over there, replacing stand-in art here and here. All this work was just for a demo for E3. Almost none of that work could be worked back into the "real" game code, and the company was essentially out thousands of dollars just for an E3 demo. And who knows if they ever recouped that money in future sales?Contrary to popular belief, no one can just "halt" development on a game at an arbitrary point and have it ready to be seen by the public. Unfinished games look and play like crap. The E3 demo was a sinkhole for money and development hours--development hours that could've actually gone into finishing the game.
kyptOct 16, 2006
2 wordslast week...:P
rheaumeOct 16, 2006
In the industry for 6 years and could never afford it, went to Thailand, bali, Hawaii, places like that instead. Always kept saying "next year, next year' and now its over as we know it. maybe it will be more fun without the drones? Hopefully.
duhblow7Oct 16, 2006
@akinderI agree with you. E3 was supposed to be an industry only event. If you went to an E3 10 years ago then went to the event this year you would notice the dramatic change from very business to very casual. Companies want spend a ton of money to show off their products and most of the execs will be at the show. This allows companies to schedule meetings with people that isn't normally possible. The volume of meaningful meetings at an event like E3 is one of the main reasons a lot of companies go.Return on investment with high level execs forming relationships with possible clients dramatically exceeds the ROI on the impact of the blogosphere of a particular client at a particular event.E3 went from a place where businesses can network to a zoo of teenagers. As I would wonder the halls of E3 I would wonder how so many pimple faced teenagers made their way into an industry only event. The people that funded this event wondered the same things.E3 became a zoo, ROI was in the red, the organizers saw this and things had to be changed. End of story.I do agree that there is a void in Northern USA for an entertainment expo (not like the one in Las Vegas) that is open to the public where companies can show off the goodies. E3 became it, but wasn't meant for it.To the guy who had the "unprecedented coverage" of RockStar games: I didn't see any "coverage" of the GOD (Gathering of Developers) girls dressed like catholic school girls at the party across the street from E3 getting naked on the big screens back pre-9/11. You missed the good stuff. :)