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The Downscaling of the E3 Videogames Convention

August 1, 2006 by Mr Butterscotch

e3sign.GIF

As reported in Kotaku and BBC news, what used to be the extravaganza, the greatest show in interactive entertainment history is now no more – at least in the three day ‘mega-format’ show. That’s right – E3 is changing. If you ask me, this is really a backward step for the industry as a whole, for a good number of reasons.

Videogames generally get a bad press a large portion of the time. Whether it’s Hilary Clinton using them as a bandwagon for her campaign or the latest ‘Halo murder’ story, games quite literally get a thoroughly bad press. This is both unfair and unjust, and I think E3 goes some way to making games seem acceptable and exciting.

Around the time of E3 I can expect reasonable coverage of my hobby – though still nowhere near as much as say cricket or other sporting interests on television – let alone football (soccer to those in the US). It says much about the industry (in the UK at least) when the best media coverage is from Consolevania – a games show available to download on the web.

Generally speaking, the suggestions so far for greater control of the event include invitation-only guests (rather than those with a press pass) along with holding all games release info/press releases at hotels and other locked-down locations. Now, to me this just reeks of potentially skewed impressions. To provide an analogy, sometimes in boxing you see a rather ‘odd’ result. Judges are wined and dined by the promoters of the home turf – I’m not suggesting that all matches are won and lost this way but it has got to help. The same would and does apply to games – a bad review and suddenly your crop of review copies dries up from a narked publisher. Not a problem from a small studio, a biggie if it’s someone like EA.

I’m not going to end this article on a doom-and-gloom note however. We can only hope that someone knows what they are doing, and it’ll actually be an improvement. One thing that might come out of it is a better-staggered release schedule. However how can that happen when publishers stick so tightly to tried and tested sales periods? From a hardcore gamers perspective, we can hope that gaming information filters through on a more gradual basis rather than missing out – as I did this year – on some of the more interesting stuff. I guess we can only wait and see what E3 2007 holds…

Filed Under: Computers, Consoles, Cool Stuff, e3 2006, Event Coverage, Gadgets, Gaming, Handheld, NextGen, Online Gaming, Software

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