Originally published at: Gaming expo E3 dead for good | Boing Boing
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Meanwhile, at PAX:
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Not a gamer to the point I would attend E3, but that has to be a bit sad for people that the industry has changed so much to kill their main trade show.
I was so so lucky to get to the Zap Amateur Open paintball tournament and trade show the last year where it felt like one big “family” of players and manufactures. Where you could be seated at the same table as the people who invented/ran the companies that made the top markers and gear, and most everyone got along.
In the next several years there was a schism in the sport, mainly due to it growing larger and people started to make real money, BS lawsuits, and other internal politics. It just was never the same after that.
Pretty crazy that a web comic spawned this and looks like is going stronger than the industry show.
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Seems like the writing was on the wall a long time ago - when they stopped being just an industry press event (because they realized the nature of the industry press had changed) and video streams became accessible to even the smallest publishers (and could get much larger audiences than E3). In particular, Devolver’s online showcases felt like a very definite point where publishers had to be wondering why they were bothering spending $100K+ for an E3 booth. Especially for smaller publishers who were spending all that money to compete for press attention with Activision, EA and the like, when they could be setting their own time for presentations and compete with no one.
Essentially, the radically changing nature of game media made it obsolete. E3 started when game magazine press were the gatekeepers for the dissemination of industry information, telling people what to get excited about, and the “press” turned into a fan-based multi-media soup (of e.g. bloggers, Youtubers and streamers) where that wasn’t the case at all. So an event where you were appealing to game writers made no sense when you wanted to be addressing the players directly. Companies could spend a couple hundred thousand dollars to potentially convince a few dozen game reporters that their game is cool when they could instead convince millions with a game trailer released online for nothing.
PAX is a very different thing serving a different set of purposes from E3, though. E3 was purely an industry press event that shoehorned in (expensive) “gamer” passes, but still primarily aimed at the press. PAX is a gamer convention. From a game company perspective, it’s about developers interacting with their audience and each other (something that wasn’t happening at E3). PAX exists, for developers, on a completely different financial scale too, and it’s indie games and small publishers primarily.
Honestly I feel like it’s a good thing. E3 was a massively expensive press event where smaller publishers tried (and largely failed) to compete with media attention with the biggest publishers that were guaranteed press coverage anyways, and everyone wasted huge sums of money in the process. It’s just not necessary nor does it even make sense anymore - there are a lot of (much, much) cheaper venues, particularly online, where publishers have more control and don’t even have to compete for attention. But it’s not even so much that the industry changed, but that the nature of the “game press” changed. The attention that publishers are trying to get is no longer a small number of reporters for a small number of game magazines, but gamers as a whole. It’s not 1995 - people learn about games directly from the internet (and indirectly via other people on the internet), not via Computer Gaming World (rip).
It might be sad for the people who made super-expensive booth decorations and the models hired to staff the booths, but other than that, I don’t see anyone shedding any tears. (Well, maybe also the magazine reporters that got invited to those lavish E3 parties put on just for them.)
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