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Posts Tagged ‘E3’

Big Small Big

February 3rd, 2009 No comments

E3 is the game industry trade show that grew immense shortly after its establishment, and then suddenly decided that it wanted to be be a smaller, more business focused event. I assumed that they had absorbed the lesson of Comdex and wished to avoid becoming another monster trade show meltdown. This is a decision that only an association event could take. No for-profit producer could walk away from revenue of this scale.

I assumed that we were going to see an exciting New Model–that they had a great idea for being a smaller event. There are a lot of cool potential here–if you were going to launch a hybrid, networked, technology-enabled event, this would be the place. Apparently not. They’re going back to being a trade show again. I hope they’ve noticed that it’s 2009.

I did a little work on Game Developer when it was being acquired by Miller Freeman. Game Developer is more business focused than E3. This is a weird industry sector. They have to put a lot of effort into keeping teenage gamers off the show floor, while making sure that teenage game development professionals (some very successful) still have access to the event.