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Spot On: E3 absentees sound off |
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After months of uncertainty, next week the gaming industry will finally
experience the new E3 Media & Business Summit. The event is the
dramatically overhauled successor to the Electronic Entertainment Expo,
which had been the central event of the North American game industry
for the previous 12 years.
E3 at the LACC.
Though
it began as a modest trade show in 1995, E3 had become a deafening
spectacle by 2006. Within weeks of the event's doors closing last May,
many members of the Entertainment Software Association, E3's organizing
body, decided the show had simply become too big, too loud, and too
expensive for most exhibitors. "Some companies were frustrated because
E3 was such a huge, sweeping event it became increasingly difficult to
get their messages out," said former ESA president Doug Lowenstein.
Before
he resigned last December, Lowenstein also promised the rechristened E3
Business & Media Summit would be drastically smaller than its
predecessor. Whereas E3 2006 boasted more than 400 exhibitors and
60,000 attendees, E3 2007 is expected to draw just 36 participating
companies and roughly 5,000 "invited guests."
The show floor has
also been downsized, with the cavernous Los Angeles Convention Center
abandoned in favor of the much smaller Barker Hangar in nearby Santa
Monica. The landscape inside the venue will also be drastically
different. Instead of the towering, neon-soaked edifices that dominated
the interior of the LACC, Barker Hanger will feature subdued,
standardized booths in two sizes--10-by-10 feet and 20-by-20 feet. "The
customization options will be really limited both inside and outside
[the booths]," a rep for a major exhibitor told GameSpot. "They will
pretty much all look the same."
Barker Hangar, site of E3 2007.
Also,
the E3 conference program--which used to feature leading industry
luminaries' keynotes--has been cut entirely. Indeed, much of the real
business of the show won't take place at Barker Hangar at all. The vast
majority of product previews will be held in private suites rented by
publishers, several of which have outsourced staffing of their
show-floor booths to external exhibition companies.
So what do
these changes mean? Will they help streamline E3 by eliminating the
chaos caused by tens of thousands of nonessential attendees stampeding
between booths? Or, have they gutted the event, turning it into a
hollow proceeding with a dubious raison d'etre?
In the days
before E3 2007 unofficially kicks off with Microsoft's press conference
next Tuesday night, GameSpot will be running interviews with the heads
of several major publishers in attendance. Today, though, we check in
with a series of companies who are skipping this year's expo--both
voluntarily and involuntarily--to see how they feel about the new E3.
An ersatz Rachel from Ninja Gaiden at Tecmo's E3 booth in 2004.
One
of the biggest publishers absent from this year's event is Tecmo.
Though its E3 booths evoke lighthearted memories of its cavalcade of
scantily clad "booth babes," the Japanese publisher of the Ninja Gaiden
and Dead or Alive series was deadly serious about why it opted out of
E3 2007.
"New show management didn't seem to know what they were
doing," Tecmo vice president John Inada told GameSpot. "I don't have
money to waste on an experimental project. Previously, we were not
treated very nicely by the old E3 management, so we didn't feel
obligated to cooperate this year. I also heard that a lot of the
[retail] buyers weren't coming."
Indeed, retail participation at
the event will be a shadow of its former self. A GameStop
representative said the company had "limited folks" attending the show,
and other retailers have opted out entirely--causing some publishers to
follow suit.
"GameStop's not really going to be there, Best
Buy's not going to be there," complained a source close to a large
publisher not attending E3. "Why should we bother dealing with the
ESA's confusion when we can meet with our retail partners separately
and then stage our own gamers' day event later on in the year where we
set the rules? It just doesn't make any sense."
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