By Staff - Posted on Monday July 31st, 2006

This past weekend, shocking news hit the Internet in the form of reports that E3, the single biggest event in the game industry each year, might be on its way out. Apparently, big game publishers had decided to pull their support of the event, possibly because E3 was just too expensive to justify the time, effort, and cost of sending out crews of staff to attend the event, prepare new demo versions of the games, and spend millions on swanky booths for the show floor. This morning, the Entertainment Software Association issued a statement suggesting that it will be changing to "a more intimate event" for press and industry professionals. It later clarified that the event will now be called the E3 Media Festival and will be moved to July. We sat down with ESA president Doug Lowenstein to find out exactly what this means for the event. But we've also got the GameSpot staffers on hand to weigh in with their gut reactions. Be sure to add your own thoughts using the comments form below.

I remember walking through one of the hallways of the Los Angeles Convention Center on the final day of E3 2006. A large, garish yellow sign hung from the rafters: "See You Next Year! E3 2007, May 16-18." Yeah, well maybe not. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, as we know it now, is due for an overhaul, largely at the behest of the biggest publishing names in the business.

What do the largest publishers get out of this restructuring? First and foremost, they save a ton of money, not having to deal with the costs of travel for employees to Los Angeles, not to mention renting of expensive floor space of the Los Angeles Convention Center, building a flashy, costly booth, and bringing specially designed E3-ready demos of their games. And the bigger companies won't have any trouble promoting their big games anyway, in a more controlled, cost-conscious manner.

For the smaller players in the industry, however, it's a different story. Despite the cost overruns and the logistical hurdles, E3 is a great place to put your game, your accessory, your product in front of a centralized and eager group of buyers, media, and potential customers that is unrivaled by any other event on the calendar year. The signal-to-noise ratio can be unnecessarily unbalanced but, as a small company, it's been a necessary risk.

Still, there could be costs to all parties, some of which may not be immediately felt. Assuming E3 moves to a boutique arrangement, with small settings for exhibitors to showcase their wares, the cachet of the event is likely to wither, as publishers focus on their own home-grown events to build buzz for their products. It's nothing new--publishers already have lavish pre-E3 events now. I can't help but wonder if those private functions will simply morph into the new standard, with all-in-one exhibitions becoming passé. As a side effect, mainstream press coverage--which loves to cover the glitzy shell of E3, if not its gooey insides--will likely be greatly reduced in this boutique arrangement. And speaking of media, the change brings up questions of how my role as a video games writer will change without an E3 to gush over every May.

Is it growing pains? Is it a warning sign of things to come? Or is it a healthy correction for an event that had become bloated and self-defeating? It's probably all of these things. It's hard to argue against publishers saving money, be they big or small, especially in such a volatile industry. But while companies' bottom lines are dictating this change for the short-term, only hindsight will determine whether or not the E3 restructuring will pay dividends in the long-term.

As much as everyone likes to complain about E3, I'm going to miss the megashow nature of it. Oh, I'll be honest in that I won't miss the breakneck pace, having to push my way through huge crowds, and the stifling heat of the convention center after-hours, when the air conditioning is turned off. At the same time, I've come to recognize that the madness of E3 is something special. I will miss the sheer grandeur of the show, its media-circus atmosphere.

I've heard grumblings for years that companies have been unhappy about the state of E3, and how they have to spend more and more money and resources to compete. Every year the sound and light show that is E3 escalated, and it has gotten to the point that publishers have to send emissaries to neighboring booths to ask them to dial down the volume because it's so deafening. It's just not worth it, especially if you consider that a publisher can easily blow millions of dollars to create an extravagant booth, fly hundreds of employees to LA and put them in hotels for a week, and then watch as some other publisher steals all the thunder and the E3 crowds. Far easier and cheaper to simply have your own dedicated event, where you can control everything and not have to worry about what the competition is doing next door.

Still, as a student of history, I realize that this is a chapter closing. The megashow symbolized everything that was both great and not so great about the industry. Having every upcoming game in one place was simply an awe-inspiring experience, but not so much fun was the catering to the lowest common denominator with scantily-clad booth babes or the marketing of sequel after sequel rather than original ideas. Yet I'm also a bit apprehensive about this smaller E3 format. One of the nice things about the megashow is that it draws positive mainstream press coverage like no other event. E3 has become the "face" of the industry, and I just don't know if a "smaller" E3 will be able to say the same.

I suppose if I had to fix E3, I'd stick with the large format, but I'd enforce stringent admissions rules to get rid of the thousands of people that don't need to be there. So "yes" to the buyers from each retail chain, the ones responsible for the bulk orders of each game; but do we really need every manager, assistant manager, and part-time sales clerk from each store there? And while we're at it, let's crack down on the media badges so that only real news organizations get in. Also, if the NFL can have a salary cap, why can't E3 have a booth-spending cap? Keep the arms race in check, and get the escalating costs under control. I'd try that, and if that didn't work, then I would go with the smaller format.

After reading today's press release from the ESA, I was left with one big question.

Where are these "small meetings" going to take place?

The press release states it will all still take place in LA, but no mention of the LA Convention Center. And I think that was intentional. My guess is that they are going to take place in hotel rooms and meeting rooms throughout Los Angeles and Hollywood. And this puts me in a very, very bad mood.

As if it wasn't already hard enough to get out on the show floor to do proper coverage of games for the world to see, now it appears the media will have to travel all around a city to various hotels or other locations to provide top-notch coverage. And if you work in a video group (e.g. GameSpot Live), you have to worry about lugging around cameras, tripods, and lighting all over the city, too. It gets heavy and your back doesn't like it. Trust me, it sucks.

Then there's the big impact that E3 has on the public. Not only do the interactive entertainment media, GameSpot included, converge on the show, but so do the mass media. E3's glamour was definitely a big part of the reason why stations like CNN would cover the show, and, in my opinion, a new low-key setup where demos are spread across meeting rooms or hotel rooms will just force them to look away for the most part.

When cutting back E3's grand style, I wish the ESA would have worked with all parties it would have an impact on--especially the industry media, who by far puts in the most man-hours during the week of the show. Our bodies and minds are put to an extreme test every year, and that's with most of the stuff we need to cover confined to one huge building. Just imagine how much harder it might be on us with us having to spread ourselves out all over a huge city.

While retailers and other industry audiences are indeed important for E3, I strongly feel the interactive entertainment media is by far the most essential part of it. We give the world the inside scoop on everything that is E3. The public largely looks to us when trying to determine what games from E3 they should keep their eye on as development progresses. So, outside of the exhibitors themselves, I feel we, the media, should have had the opportunity to put on our word of what we feel could have been done to make E3 a better conference for everyone. For example, I have a feeling we would have all made a push to move the conference to San Francisco, home to most major video game media outlets as well as a number of game developers and publishers. That alone would have made it easier on all of us with the new setup. Oh well, we can't always have our way.

If I wanted to, I guess I could claim that this isn't a big surprise. But it is, just because of how huge a part of my life E3 has been for the past seven or eight years. It started out as a trade-only event, and then it expanded to include the press but turned into a kind of taboo-consumer-event-that-wasn't-really-taboo. You know what I mean. Every year, as soon as May rolled around, all anyone talked about was getting into E3--how old we needed to be to get in, how much we'd love to go, and most importantly, what tricks and shortcuts we could use to sneak in. Because it wasn't just about the games anymore--it was about the loud music, the free giveaways, and the beautiful women who would let you stand near them!

Not only did E3 seem to become less and less about the games, but it also seemed like the show couldn't figure out exactly what it was supposed to be. In 2005, there was actually a concerted marketing effort to get more people to pay the expensive ticket price to get in and experience what an exciting and fun show it was, an effort that I felt was grossly irresponsible. The single most important event in the game industry became a mixed-message consumer event ("This is an industry-only show and you must be 18 or older and have ID and credentials...to see the hottest new games and consoles in the world before anyone else! It's all here: games, beautiful women, and excitement!!"). The cat was basically out of the bag: How could you get these stowaways to stop sneaking in, not to mention telling their friends about how awesome E3 was and how they, too, should try to sneak in? With the halls of the LACC full to bursting with people who had absolutely no business being there, E3 seemed to lose most of its value as an actual trade event. By 2006, it seemed like having an honest-to-goodness public shindig would make much more sense.

In the short run, I guess it's a relief that we apparently won't have to worry about E3 being the monstrous event it traditionally is. In the long run, I'm a lot more concerned about what kind of message this sends to people outside the game industry. For better or for worse, E3 was something that caught the eye of both the mainstream press and Wall Street...and this change could mean challenging times ahead for a business that, for the last few years, has so proudly claimed to be bigger than Hollywood.

As the E3 rookie on the GameSpot team, I was thrown directly into the thick of things this past May. It was the first E3 I had the pleasure of attending, and I barely had time to catch my breath between filming the mad rush to the Wii line, the insanity of the Sony press conference, and the constant bombardment of gaming news coming from every direction. My experience from E3 was slightly different than the average attendee given I spent nearly every hour working from within the confines of the luxurious GameSpot booth, but there's still something to be said for three straight days of just being immersed in what has been called the mecca of video gaming. Until I attended E3 it had always had that air of mystery, being that "closed doors" conference that seemed to draw anyone and everyone from around the world. In fact, while I was working diligently in May 2003 during crunch time on one of my final college projects, one of my project partners even found the time to make the six-hour drive overnight, make use of his E3 pass for one single day, then arrive back at school that evening to finish his part of the project. Truly a mecca.

So with the news of the ESA favoring a "smaller, faster, cheaper" E3, I have to say I'd fall among those that are sad to see the end of an era. And while so many of us lament the change, we all have to admit it was inevitable. Smaller publishers had difficulty in getting their games noticed, and the crowd was becoming more and more diluted each year. Fines were being levied against publishers for both the rising noise levels and booth-babe midriff lines. E3 was just getting too big for its britches.

So, in as much awe of E3 I was when I first arrived, I was more amazed at the amount of effort put forth by the GameSpot crew, both on and off camera. We were there with the mission to tackle a monster, one that grew stronger and more adversarial with each passing year. While I had always imagined that I'd be wandering the show floor among that wide-eyed crowd with my schwag bag in hand, my first E3 experience instead changed that dream into a mountain to climb, a raging river to be crossed--a growing challenge that, until today, I had looked forward to confronting each year. Now the ESA has gone and slain the dragon for us, and we are left in uncertainty as to what sort of E3 will be rising out of the ashes. Whatever will take its place will no doubt be a more effective vessel for the industry as a whole, but it won't nearly be the same Everest it once was. I, for one, will miss that.