So everyone has an opinion on the demise - sorry, evolution - of E3. It had to happen: for the last few years it's been a bizarre, noisy and hugely expensive simulacrum of a tradeshow benefiting no-one but the news sites that managed to make a few bucks selling E3 DVDs. I will not miss the crowds, the whooping masses hollering at game videos - E3 symbolised the whole image-is-everything approach to game development that has been strangling the creative life out of the industry for years.
Or did it?
Indie developer Greg Costikyan draws our attention to the small publishers and developers who camped out in the event's tiny Kentia hall - likely to be left out of the forthcoming media festival, these companies will no longer find such an astonishingly large audience for their wares.
Greg suggests going in the other direction and turning E3 into a huge consumer event: "...something more like GenCon or Leipzig. Throw the "trade only" restriction out the window, open it up to actual gamers, charge them enough to make big bux for the ESA, ramp up attendance from 40k to 100k plus, and make it an event where publishers market to consumers as well as the trade."
No, things are better this way. The likes of Leipzig, Tokyo Game Show and the Edinburgh Games Festival put a different cultural spin on the games industry - this can only be a positive thing. Perhaps we will see a proliferation of small specialist shows cropping up - we already have events dedicated to casual games, sex in games, indie games... It's the long tail theory again - lots of small, tightly targeted events replacing the mainstream leviathan.
I also think that the death of E3 will be good news for videogame magazines. A single, all-consuming mass media event in which everyone got everything at the same time only ever played into the hands of the internet games sites. But an industry in which publishers choose their own times to reveal new products puts the impetus back on magazines to work deals and haggle for exclusives. Once again it might be possible to maintain a relevant, vibrant news section for 13 issues a year.
