Joystiq

After the 2006 show game publishers decided they were spending too much money. Doug Lowenstein, the respected ESA president who started E3 in the mid-90's, read the writing on the wall, polished up his resume, and moved on to greener pastures. In between Doug's departure and the arrival of his replacement, Michael Gallagher, the ESA threw together a low budget, patchwork show in Santa Monica for 2007. For a variety of reasons, it bombed.

"Compared to E3's better times, it was the equivalent of holding the show in a closet."

With the show back in L.A. this year, attendees were hoping to recapture some of that old E3 glory, but it was not to be. If anything, this year's show was worse than Santa Monica. Not only was it poorly planned and poorly executed, but holding it in the LACC was a cruel, if unintentional joke. E3 veterans who recalled the glory days when the massive confines of South Hall and West Hall were filled to the brim with towering game exhibits stared blankly at the locked doors of those once-bustling rooms. This year's show floor, such as it was, amounted to four rows of small booths in a drab room off the Convention Center's main hallway. Compared to E3's better times, it was the equivalent of holding the show in a closet. One major industry figure I spoke to quipped that the Into the Pixel game art exhibit had more square footage devoted to it than the show floor. At one point in mid-show I stood next to a former high level game company exec who waved his hand at the nearly vacant lobby outside West Hall and summed up his feelings in a single word: "Appalling." Ubisoft North America president Laurent Detoc, told the San Francisco Chronicle, "E3 this year is terrible. The world used to come to E3. Now it's like a pipe-fitters show in the basement."

I can't disagree.

But it wasn't just a couple of money guys complaining. Game industry worker bees complained that scheduling press conferences on the same days that the expo was open led to no-show appointments as some overbooked media types opted for the press conferences instead of their scheduled meetings. And then there was the embarrassment of having only 50 people show up for Gov. Rick Perry's keynote. Or less than a hundred for the ESA CEO's state-of-the-industry speech. And, without the big E3 buzz, the national media stayed away in droves. It didn't help that there were no major announcements or surprises to speak of at the show. GTA on the DS? Cool. Got any game play footage? No?

Never mind.

"It didn't help that there were no major announcements or surprises to speak of at the show."

You can lay some of this, of course, at the feet of the ESA, which operates the show. On the other hand, it was the game publishers who wanted to spend less money on E3. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Without the substantial E3 revenues of the big years, the ESA was forced to raise its membership dues, reportedly by as much as 400%. And some publishers(Activision, Vivendi, LucasArts, id, Crave to date) have bailed because of that. Don't be surprised if a few more jump ship now that the show is over, leaving the ESA in even worse financial straits. Eventually the lack of revenue, be it from E3 or membership dues, translates to cutting back on the services that the ESA provides to the industry: lobbying, IP protection and free speech issues.

So, were game publishers better off with an expensive E3 and a healthy ESA to represent their interests or with a terminally ill E3 and a fragmented, underfunded ESA?

The answer seems obvious. What's also obvious is that you can go ahead and schedule that trip to the beach you were planning for next July. You won't be coming to Los Angeles.

E3 is dead.

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Dennis McCauley is Editor of GamePolitics.com and writes about games for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Opinions expressed in The Political Game are his own. Reach him at