Why are some of gaming's biggest publishers abandoning E3?

[dlevere]

ESA Hits Back At E3 Critics

By Christopher Dring

A defiant ESA, the organizer of E3, says the LA expo is ‘essential and critical’ to the games industry.

Its comments come after Activision joined EA in not renewing its E3 booth for 2016. The two businesses follow the likes of Sega, Bandai Namco and Disney in no-longer booking space on the show floor.


And to counteract the exodus of exhibitors, ESA’s Rich Taylor tells MCV that E3 may open its doors to consumers to win back some of these companies – a process that could start as early as this year.

“The ‘is E3 still relevant?’ question gets asked every year, and then gets answered in June of that same year with a resounding ‘yes’,” he insisted.

“E3 is beyond relevant, it is essential and critical to the game and entertainment industry calendar. It changes, it has never been a stagnant show and this year is no different. Last year if you asked most people, in the aftermath of E3 how they found it, many will tell you it was the best E3 they can remember. But in the ramp up to that show, I was answering the same sort of questions that you just put to me.

“One of the things we do at the close of every E3 is that we talk to everyone we can... and we try and figure out how to change the experience and make it better. We’ve done that this time, and we will be making adjustments to guarantee it is going to be a tremendous show. There are a number of press briefings going on - a record number,I believe - that starts a few days before E3. That’s a reflection of the fact that people realise that this is the place to make news and break news, and have that amplified around the globe in a way like no other show can.”

He added: “The consumer question is certainly part of the equation and one we will be taking a hard look at. You saw last year, certain companies brought along some of their most valued customers. We will probably end up doing that again this year, and there will be some additional elements on top of that, that may or may not come. But we are always trying to figure out what we need to do, such as finding ways to better accommodate and facilitate YouTube personalities.”

For this year’s show, Taylor says that although EA and Activision may be absent, ESA are actively pursuing other big business to fill the gap.

“We obviously want to have a robust, energetic show floor. So if people aren’t there, we will find others to be there. E3 is a place that people want to be. We are not a mortuary convention, it is quite the opposite. There is a lot of activity in this space, from the college level to indie developers to triple-A titles. We are talking to, and are talking to, a number of entities and developers, and encouraging them and inviting them to be a part of the show, when perhaps in the past they have not been.”

[Pyriel]

Yeah, I have to agree with that. The day someone invents a way of searching videos with any array of natural keywords you like is the day I'll consider that maybe text is dead.

Sometimes a video is a good thing, e.g., when the puzzle involves kicking a specific pixel, or you need to find a spot on a map using several landmarks that are difficult to describe. More often than not, it seems like someone is just padding things out for production values. And gamers are a notably obsessive lot in the first place. It makes perfect sense that when some twat sits down to share the secrets of his favorite game, he's never going to get to the damn point without endless digression or excessive detail. Somebody sent me a video on some Kingdom Hearts fan theory and the guy who made it seemed to be trying to set a record for the most rerererereiterations in one video. I ended up skipping through a few of his other videos, and all of them are like that. The scary part is that he had over 100K subscribers, despite the fact that most of his 8-15 minute clips contain only ten unique thoughts, phrased as twenty different run-on sentences each.

[Viper187]

You guys don't like those 2 hour streams of video game publishers newest games? Some of our biggest memories come from that. FF VII re-release on PS4. Who else didn't love getting trolled with that? Funny as heck I say. Also they published the first trailer of FF VII remake at E3.

No, I don't. If it weren't for bullshit like E3, we might've have known months sooner instead of them waiting for the big show to try to grab the fucking spotlight. They can release the shit to the internet and advertise without E3, and not everything needs a goddamn video. I hate that shit. People used to write guides for things with pictures. Now everything is fucking video: simple announcements, previews, reviews, guides. 95% of walkthroughs are loaded with shit wasting my time. I don't want to see the fucking title screen and menus when you start your playthrough. I know WTF those look like. Show me the quickest way through the fucking game without walking in circles, looking around like an idiot, or spending 5 minutes setting it up. All those Youtube/Twitch assholes piss me off.

[MathUser]

You guys don't like those 2 hour streams of video game publishers newest games? Some of our biggest memories come from that. FF VII re-release on PS4. Who else didn't love getting trolled with that? Funny as heck I say. Also they published the first trailer of FF VII remake at E3.

[nensondubois]

E3 turned to shit many years ago just like pretty much everything else.

[bungholio]

Seems like I see this article every year. I'd agree with Viper, give me some cool videos of stuff and possibly some times, nobody needs a big over-hyped convention of douche bags trying to make the greatest impression they can. I'm sure we'll see the usual new CoD, Battlefield, GTA, Halo, Destiny, and you get the idea with maybe small sprinkles of some interesting stuff, but we don't need everybody fighting to be on stage because it's annoying. I cringe every time I see Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo do their gigs and try to make things sound as incredible as possible when it's all the same stuff from years before, and they choke out the little guys that might have some "actual" gems worth paying attention to. It is nice some developers wait to make their cool polished videos for showing at just this time of year and things are jam-packed together for overload, but they could really do it any time to space out the hype.

I'm sure I'll see what will feel like Sony and Microsoft duking it out while Nintendo doesn't bother but I'll still dislike them more than the rest, they'll have their 50 new games involving Mario, Link, Samus, Star Fox, Donkey Kong, and I can't think of a 6th, much like them, because it's the same thing over and over. I'm already cringing, somebody will mention Nintendo at work and I'll resist the urge to say "WHO GIVES A RATS ASS ABOUT THE 200TH MARIO GAME COMING OUT, IT'S THE SAME F*CKING THING EVERY GAME PEOPLE, SHUT IT YOU LOBOTOMIZED NINTENDO ZOMBIES!!!"

I never imagined when I first loved Mario Bros 3 at age 3 I'd come to a point of despising Mario, Nintendo needs to drop everything and get something genuinely new, and not touch anything they've already done for the next 20 years or something. Then they do get something new and it's "Wario and Waluigi", the imaginative genius. They can now do Oiram and Igiul, the Jewish Bros out for those coins.

My god I need to click Post Quick Reply and click X out of this before I headbutt my screen and break it just thinking about it.

[Viper187]

Fuck E3. Just tell us what's coming and when. We don't need silly conventions that aren't even open to the public. It's just a shit show for hype.

[MathUser]

I wish this wouldn't happen tho. I look forward to E3.

[dlevere]

Wargaming, Disney join EA and Activision in sitting out the show.

By Kyle Orland


Those were the days...

The annual orgy of game marketing and hype that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo will be a little less hype-filled this year, as some of gaming's biggest publishers have decided not to buy space on the Los Angeles Convention Center show floor.

VentureBeat reports today that Disney Interactive and Wargaming won't have booths at E3 2016. The two major publishers join Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts, which announced in recent weeks that they are also opting out of the show (though EA will have a press event and "hands-on" demos at an off-site location in the days before the show starts).

Wargaming, which has maintained a large E3 booth since 2011, summarized the reasons for its departure in an e-mail to Venturebeat. "From a strictly business perspective, E3 just doesn’t fit our current direction," a company spokesperson said. "It’s a show that is very centralized on retail product, and as a free-to-play digital download gaming company, we’ve realized that while the show may be a good fit for lots of other publishers and developers, it’s currently not a great fit for us."

That probably understates the huge changes in the industry and the media that have made a big, over-the-top show like E3 less relevant for many companies. Once upon a time, E3 was an efficient way to gather representatives from the few major video game magazines (and some mainstream press outlets) together to help drive the marketing agenda for the entire year. Now rather than investing millions in a booth, it's much simpler to send an early build of your game to a few popular YouTube and streaming stars who can put the game directly in front of players. Or better yet, companies can simply launch the game in an early beta and let the fans see everything directly.

Competing fan-focused conventions like PAX can also offer publishers the opportunity to attract press coverage while reaching out directly to gamers simultaneously.

Unlike similar international conventions like Gamescom and the Tokyo Game Show, E3 has never let members of the general public onto the show floor. When asked if there are plans to change this, the Entertainment Software Association's Rich Taylor told Gamesbeat, "I don’t think the answer is to roll up the bay doors in the back of the convention center and firing a starter pistol. I think it has to be strategic."

Mobile game makers, not AAA publishers, push their product to viewers. On top of all this, there are the changes in the game industry itself. The largest game publishers are increasingly focusing their efforts on fewer and fewer tent-pole blockbusters, making it harder to justify expensive show floor space for what might only be a handful of new games.

Smaller independent developers can and do band together to get show space as "Indie Megabooth"-style conglomerates, but a crowded and loud show floor often isn't the best venue to show off these new and unheard-of games. And the makers of free-to-play, micro-transaction-driven mobile and casual games usually would rather spend their marketing dollars on Super Bowl ads than glitzy show floor booths that their audience probably wouldn't pay attention to anyway.

The new E3 exodus isn't quite a low point for the show, which the ESA has put on since 1995. That came in 2007 and 2008, when E3 scaled back significantly to a more "intimate" format that included only 5,000 to 10,000 attendees (for context, last year's show attracted 53,000 industry members). This year's show won't be nearly that small. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo will still anchor the event with large, console-pushing booths, and major publishers like Bethesda (which held its first-ever E3 press conference last year) are at least partially filling the gap left by the departing big names.

Still, the absence of some of gaming's biggest companies is a recognition that E3 is not the agenda-setting, calendar-defining event it once was in the industry. In an increasingly fragmenting media and gaming landscape, the days when a single flagship show can serve the entire industry effectively may be coming to an end.