Why is E3 Still So Important?

E3 has been a very lackluster event since its restructuring into an industry only conference in 2007.  Sure, it’s great for networking in the video game industry, flashy press conferences with pyrotechnics and monitors that are bigger than my bedroom, and, most importantly, the Booth Babes.  In a recent post on gamebizblog by Colin Campbell, E3 is deconstructed as an astronomic waste of money. The retail chain buyers are losing their power in what consumers buy, as the majority of industry coverage shifts online and into the hands of the public.

One of the major talking points of the post was about the overall cost of E3, how the publishers will spend ridiculous amounts of money on their E3 booth/presentation, and how irrelevant this all is. E3 used to be for the retail heads to come out and look at a ton of games, to pick which ones they wanted to sell during the fall rush.  However, this is irrelevant now, as the retailers don’t have the power that they used to thanks to blogs, metacritic, and other online sources.  Which in part, is true.  The majority of people that go out to buy new games are going to look up what they want, go into the store ‘” or in a lot of cases, their favorite online store ‘” and buy it.  Very few people go in to a store and look for a game to buy.

Another thing that Campbell talks about in his post is the networking that E3 provides.  You have ‘” essentially ‘” the entire games industry in one place.  So chances are you’re going to have drinks with a relatively important person at one point and get to pick their brain about where they think the industry is going.  However, the flipside to this is that when you’re cramped in a hallway with about 50 other journos trying to record an interview, things can get a bit frustrating.

So is E3 really as relevant as it was 4 or 5 years ago?  Sure, a lot of companies hold back a lot of announcements until the big show, but modern “journalism” has outgrown this concentrated,  and extravagant method of showing their stuff to the consumers.  With the advent of social networking, bloggers, and RSS feeds giving consumers more viewpoints and information than they can handle about games that they’re interested in, the dinosaur that is E3 should just stop trying to stay alive and go back to the tar pit from whence it came.  It’s a misallocation of funding that could be better spent exploiting more modern methods of advertising products, or better yet, funding for development teams.

Read gamebizblog for the more in-depth analysis.