From alistdaily.com: The Electronic Entertainment Expo’s contract with the Los Angeles Convention Center is expiring in 2015, and the Entertainment Software Association is free to find another venue. As is normal when such a contract comes up, public statements are the first maneuvers before contract negotiations begin. “E3 is a world class show that deserves a world class venue. The Los Angeles Convention Center is no longer a top-tier property,” said ESA head Mike Gallagher in an interview with CNBC. Before signing a contract for E3 at any venue, though, the ESA should rethink the very nature of E3. As the game industry is changing, the nature of E3 is changing. How and where E3 occurs should also change, and radically.
First, the ESA needs to recognize and acknowledge that the target audience for E3 has changed. The show was originally staged as a place for publishers to show off products to retail buyers first and foremost, with the intent of maximizing orders. Secondarily, while you had all those booths set up to impress buyers, you might as well show products to the media and get some press coverage. Yes, ultimately gamers bought the products, but if a game wasn’t on a shelf in the store gamers couldn’t get it, and probably didn’t even know it existed. So the focus of E3 was impressing retail buyers.
Now the distribution and sale of games has been utterly transformed. Yes, there are still plenty of games sold in retail stores. But there’s only a handful of retail chains that matter: GameStop, Walmart, Target, Best Buy in the US. Other countries with substantial retail sales have different chains to consider, but the basic reality is the same. For a fraction of the cost of an expo booth, a publisher can fly in all the retail buyers that matter and put them up in luxury suites for a week while giving them individual demonstrations of all the games.
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