[Editorial] E3: In with the New

Andrew Knight follows up his piece on why the old E3 had to change with why he believes that the Entertainment Software Association have got it wrong with the new format.

In Part 1 of this feature (link) I detailed the various reasons why I thought that E3 was due for a change. And change it has, massively. In July 2006 The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) announced to the world that E3 as the world knew it would be no more…

…and instead would be replaced with “a more intimate event focused on targeted, personalized meetings and activities.” After the initial shock had worn off, I think most people within the industry were eagerly expecting details on what the changes would be. In the following months those details came to light.

E3 is downsizing from sixty thousand attendees to just five. It is moving to a selection of hotels in nearby Santa Monica. It changed its date to mid July. It was changing its name to the E3 Media & Business Summit. But the real crux of the changes was that it was becoming invite only. For exhibitors this means applying to ESA for an invite to exhibit and more importantly for attendees it means you can only attend if you receive an invite from an exhibitor. At first glance this seems to be the answer to everyone’s prayers. Lower costs, no enormous noisy conference to half kill yourself having to navigate around and only people there that really should be there. Fantastic I thought, finally an opportunity to actually get some really good quality interviews in. I’ll also be able to use my dictaphone again instead of having to take notes whilst trying to pay attention and formulate a decent follow up question. Unfortunately there are a few major issues with the new format.

The first of these is that because of the downsizing of the number of exhibitors, and because it is invite only, it means that a lot of the smaller companies will not be able to show off their wares. The issue is that the smaller business did a lot of their business due to passing traffic. By their very nature, potential clients and journalists are not likely to want to make a trip out to Santa Monica just to see them. Admittedly visitors that are attending for other companies may well also visit any smaller companies that are exhibiting. However the general feeling is that these companies won’t be there in the first place as it simply is not cost effective for them to be so, assuming they were extended an invite in the first place from ESA. At the old style E3 there were over 400 exhibitors showing off over 1200 products, so from a journalist’s point of view, there was no way you could know every product that fitted your publication. Obviously the big names you would know, and if you knew your stuff you would know the medium sized ones too, however a lot of the smaller titles you only discovered by browsing the show room floor.

In the new format E3 there have are currently only 33 exhibitors announced currently, so down significantly from the previous 400, but that does not tell the whole story as lot of the business done at E3 didn’t involve booths at all. A number of the interviews I’ve done in the past at E3 involved meeting with company representatives away from the show floor, be that at a nearby bar or at the cafe in the convention centre. Some companies just did not see it as cost effective to run a booth at E3, so instead would just take advantage of the entirety of the industry and its media being in one place at the same time.

The biggest concern I have with the format of the E3 Media & Business Summit though is the fact that visitors are only allowed to attend if invited by the exhibitors, including journalists. One of the biggest problems, for the consumer, that any industry can face is a biased media. Any industry has this to a degree, and a lot of it is truly unintentional. If you are a journalist it is in your interest to be friendly with those in Public Relations as it can help ensure that your publication gets the next exclusive. Also, the reverse is true, if you are in public relations it is in your interest to be friendly with journalists to encourage them to write as positive a view of your product as you can. As you can imagine this leads to a fairly palsy relationship between PR and the press. This in turn leads to journalists not wanting to write negatively about products that their mate Steve is doing the PR for. That’s the best of it though, there are numerous stories you hear from time to time concerning companies pulling lowly scored reviews, to only have them reappear slightly rewritten and with a higher score. This normally occurs either during or just before a big marketing campaign in the publication for the reviewed product. This isn’t something that is rampant through the industry’s media; however it is not something that is all that rare either. The point is, a good review or preview can often be bought, one way or another. Not that it is any great surprise that this goes on, game publishers, developers & the media are all there to make money. Their overall drive is not to give the consumer what they want or need, if they do that it is a welcome bonus, it’s just not top of their list of goals. It is an unfortunate fact, that just about all aspects of the Games Industry is a business and as such they have to watch their profit margins, the knock on affect of that is that some journalists do not feel that they can give an honest opinion for fear that they will upset the hand that feeds.

That is another article in and of itself though. The issue with having it so journalists can only attend E3, if invited by the exhibitors themselves, is that it means that a proportion of those journalists will not want to rock the boat, either during E3 or afterwards, on the chance that they won’t be invited back next time. This is especially true of journalists who work for publications that were only just large enough to get invited as they have more to risk by being negative. Journalists who work on small publications today are those that will be working on the big name publications tomorrow though, and I worry that if they will bend their integrity now, when they feel that they have to, that they will continue to do so tomorrow too.

So what does all this negativity really mean then? Personally I believe that, without doubt, E3 will no longer be the date in the industry’s calendar to see and to be seen. It’s possible that another exhibition will take its place, possibly the Leipzig Games Convention, although I think it more likely that we will never see the like of E3, as it was, again. Without the scale of the old E3 there will be less reason for exhibitors to wait to make their announcements there, instead choosing to hold their own separate press events. It will not make much difference to the big names in the gaming world, only the smaller companies that depended on passing E3 trade and the media which would not normally travel around the world to see them. More importantly, it is the consumer who loses out as the coverage they will get of the new format E3 will potentially be in danger of lacking integrity.

As for what I believe the ESA should have done, or maybe should still do, is change the format of the new E3 so that it is not up to the exhibitors to give out the invitations. Instead it should be done by the ESA, albeit in a much more tightly controlled manner then it used to be. Perhaps invitees should have to not only prove that they work in some way within the industry, but also that they have at least one appointment whilst attending. This will not fix all of the problems with the E3 Media & Business Summit; it will however make it an event that is worth attending as an exhibitor and reading about as a consumer.