From Gamasutra: We perused Gamasutra for interesting E3 news and came across this fascinating article by Simon Carless, EVP of UBM Tech’s Game Network. He had these six takeaways to say about where E3 is headed in the next few years:
1. E3’s value is transitioning to be video/streaming-centric.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, what with the rise of YouTube & Twitch. But it’s clear that E3’s value to the big game platforms, publishers & devs is for games to make announcements at the pre-show press conferences, and then appear on both their own streaming shows and others during the week.
So for example, a notable Sony game would kick off with a trailer at the Sony press conference on Sunday, then appear on Sony’s ‘live from E3 stream’ sometime on Tuesday to Thursday, while also appearing separately on the GameSpot stream, the official Twitch stream, the YouTube Gaming stream, etc, etc.
This multiplies the press value of E3, while getting the word out to lots of parallel audiences. It also becomes much more of a direct messaging-centric play to the Internet as a whole. The ‘written word’ and talking to the traditional online press for non real-time write-ups matters too. But I think it matters notably less than it used to, particularly because games are inherently a moving graphics medium.
2. E3 is becoming about publishers/platform holders talking to their own audiences directly.
The fact that EA and Activision opted to no longer have their own booths for E3 seems to be related to just this point. These publishers can talk to their audience directly just as well by holding offsite events and press conferences like EA Play, without needing to have space on the show floor. EA also internationalized its consumer outreach by having EA Play in London as well, making it more geographically diverse.
(And of course, these publishers still support E3 co-organizer and industry association ESA by being a member and funding government lobbying and other pro-industry outreach. It’s just a reallocation of funds.)
Plus, it’s not opting out of E3 week. EA and Activision can still get their games on the streams of the platform-holders and third-party editorial sites anyhow, and into the booths of the platform-holders. (There were EA games at the show, just within the Sony booth, for example.) So these publishers are participating, but redirecting funds to more direct marketing – and posting their own videos and running streams, too.
And yes, publishers like Ubisoft and Take-Two were still happy to be on site, so it’s not the case that everyone finds exhibiting at E3’s Expo to be unhelpful. It’s just not mandatory, and it definitely used to be, if you were a serious (console/core) game publisher.
Read more at Gamasutra
