Rumours abound that the games industry's premier event (in it's own excessive eyes, it has to be said) is either to be cancelled, abandoned or majorly cut back. Whilst this seems like it should be something of a shock, it isn't to me.
I certainly can see that the huge cost of having any real presence there (tens of millions of dollars for the big boys) must take a lot of justification. I mean, take Sony at the 2006 show, who by their own admission had a quite disappointing show (the PS3 getting a bit of a tonking in the press) - they had a massive presence at the show - as perhaps you might expect I guess - but also laid on a totally excessive party which was beyond huge and whilst there was a buzz to get a ticket for the exclusive event, I'm not sure that the trade as a whole would have been more bouyed by a more determined, focused effort on the products rather than the entertainment.
I've long been an advocate of E3 being not massively useful for developers in a business sense; the environment is all wrong - and compared to say the GDC (Game Developers Conference) it just doesn't have the focus. We always generally attend E3, it's one of those events that you are kind of notable for your absence if not your presence - and whilst its another chance to catch up and schmooze with publisher & developer contacts, it's GDC every time for me, in terms of actively getting things done.
So we'll wait and see, maybe E3 will need to cut back it's sprawl and spend, a little like what happened to the UK's event (ECTS) about 6-7years ago.
Maybe it'll just be E2 next May...
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