RIP E3? Maybe More Of A Metamorphosis
It looks like E3, the videogame industry’s largest annual event, is going to be going through some serious changes.
In contradiction to an earlier report from NextGen that the event is going to be cancelled for next year and the foreseeable future, Ars Technica is reporting that the conference is going to refocus and move to a more closed-door format.
That’s pretty big news, although interestingly enough I never made it to the event - too much like marketing for my then developer centric viewpoint :-) I wonder if this means that the marketing focus will switch over to GDC. I’ve been to almost every GDC since 1995 and increasingly it’s been an event where more and more deals are being done.
I wonder if that, along with the increasing expense of exhibiting, made it no longer worthwhile?
More to the point, with the exposure that new games get online these days, what, if any, was the point at all?
As a side note, one of the big problems with E3 from a game development standpoint was that E3 had to effectively be a milestone in your schedule. If you were shipping that (or even the next) year, you had to show at E3 and that meant producing a playable stable build that was good enough to put in front of people that might determine the future of your products sales.
And that build had to be produced no matter how disruptive it was to your development schedule. If effect, E3 could lengthen your schedule.
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