No More E3

But but but....what will the parking lots do if they don't have anyone to charge 80 dollars for "convenient" parking in May?!

I'll wait till I see something official before I give this any serious thought.

I agree, especially considering that media exposure is increasing now that G4 broadcasts live from the floor for 4 hours a day.

What's G4?

Also, E3 not cancelled, but will be downsized.

G4 is the video game channel.

Well, it was at one point, anyway.

What's with the name, anyway? What the hell does G4 mean?

It's still half a video game channel, at least. And I have no clue what that stands for. Of course, who knows what ZD stood for?

I liked it better when it still acted like TechTV meant something.

It was even better before it was TechTV.

Ziff-Davis Network

And I think G4 stands for the generation of video games.

Wow, never would have guessed Ziff-Davis.

And the G4 thing makes sense. I always thoguht, in the back of my mind that the G stood for generation.

I think the full name is G4TV, so I always assumed it was Games 4 T.V. I suppose that's way to bland for the marketing people who brand such things.

actually i think its supposed to mean games, girls, gadgets, and a fourth g that I forget.

Back on topic. This is really disheartening news. I was lucky enough to attend one E3, and still count it as fulfilling one of my great fanboy dreams. For the past 10 years gamers have looked to May as being THE time of the year. I can't fathom going through a May without having the deluge of E3 news. I mean, as a pure reader, it took me till July to get through all the articles on games I was interested digested.

I dont understand the cash argument either. How would publishers measure E3's affect on game sales? True its probably not worth spending several million on a booth, but how can they directly correlate E3 spending with diminishing returns?

Hopefully the E3 scalebacks won't keep me out in May.

My guess is this is part of an ongoing effort to try and purge the more fanboyish aspects of the show, focusing more on business rather than one-up-manship and geek pandering.

That's how it seemed to come off to me, as well. It will be interesting to see how it's actually going to affect the show.

It's absolutely necessary. Most of the big companies have been holding their big presentations and announcements outside of the main show for some time, and it just doesn't make financial sense to spend the majority of your marketing budget on a huge stand at an overcrowded show where whatever announcements you make will be fighting for attention with everyone else in the industry.

It's a cacophony and right now the only people benefitting are the people sitting at home, refreshing their web browsers for updates from the showfloor made by people who get in the way of actual business being done.

Drastic changes are required to prevent the show turning into a funfair and, even though I'll probably never attend the show again, it's long overdue.

Many publishers also hold pre-E3 events in April now; an entire week of that month is given over to a series of meetings at which the press sees most of what will be at the show. So by the time the show actually rolls around, a bunch of the coverage that's being run was written or at least sketched out a month ago.

And for the amount of money Sony spends on their E3 party every year, you could finance a couple of games. That's not even taking the booth and press conference into account.

Downsizing couldn't happen to a more deserving show.

Edited to add: And while the press and the fans are good at taking E3 as if it's all for them, it's really for buyers, with press as an added bonus. And that's how it should be.

That's kind of how I felt at this year's Comic Con. Aside from hanging out with a handful of people, there was little benefit to be had from being there as opposed to seeing it or reading about it online.

For a year like this, when you have some genuinely huge announcements and products to show off, E3 is useful, especially in Nintendo's case, where they had to put their new system in the hands of as many people as possible to prove they knew what they were doing. Years like this, the focus is squarely on the technology, which is the way it should be.

Most years, however, the only interesting stuff that comes out for the general public are mid-level game announcements, and the show overcompensates by making it as big and loud and garish a spectacle as possible. They made the right move this year by cutting back the booth babes and restricting access (even if it did mean screwing me out of the ability to go for the first year I've been financially able to do so), but it's not enough, and the overhaul should get things to where they belong.

It's the right move, but they really only have themselves to blame.

This is just like the owners of sports teams getting together and deciding to add salary caps to their leagues because they'd been too busy outbidding each other for players and watching the salaries escalate out of control.

The legion of fans and illegitimate press that have attended the show in recent years has indeed gotten out of hand, but I don't blame any of those people for wanting to attend. It's the ESA, the big 3, and the major publishers who are responsible for this.

Microsoft notwithstanding, ironic that the three companies pushing for a smaller, more intimate event had the three worst presentations this year.

Okay, it was more than just "downsized"...

I think we all agree that it was getting out of hand and needed to refocus and downsize. But is this going a little too extreme in the other direction? From the LACC to hotel conference rooms? And now it's the "E3 Media Festival" and might be more than just gaming? They might as well have indeed scrapped it altogether.

Makes me wonder if some of the exhibitors are going to try and find something new besides E3.

E3 was strictly for business and if that works out well enough I'd imagine some developers would still want some place to put on a show, maybe on a much much smaller scare, but a show nonetheless.

If PAX were to act fast, in my eyes, it has the chance to become the new "Watch Shit Get Unveiled At" show.

GDC is growing but I dont know if it has the potential to become a circus like E3.

That was what killed ECTS, the British equivalent of E3. I think Activision was the first publisher to make all their big announcements at their own event - which soon became the annual Activate press outing - and it didn't take long for the other majors to follow suit. It doesn't make sense to spend an enormous sum on a giant flashing stand, all the staff and literature needed to populate it, only to be competing for attention with everyone else in the industry. Once Sony launched their PlayStation Experience, half of which was just gamepods for the public, the other half for business talk, the writing was on the wall.

ECTS ended up with a few mid-level publishers as the star attractions, and a shitload of Belgian peripheral companies. And with the advent of sites like GamesPress, journalists realised that they weren't going to see anything they hadn't already downloaded before setting off.

E3 was dying back in 1997 and 1998 when it was held in Atlanta. Attendance plummeted, because lots of companies just couldn't be bothered to travel to it. If the show still had a vital role to play in the business side of the industry, that wouldn't have been the case.

The idea of calling it the E3 Media Festival sounds lame though, and brings back sour memories of all the other times the games industry has caved in to its crippling inferiority complex where movies and television are concerned.