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E3 was successful for little guys too
Okay, we admit it. Despite E3's recent return to form, we missed Kentia Hall's secluded cave of unspoken delights, if only for its cheap food and even cheaper thrills. Still, the lack of a space to call their own didn't stop some companies from venturing to the surface and setting up shop in the outskirts of E3 proper. It's an adventure that, according to some, was well worth the effort. Glad we all agree.Operating a booth on the fringe of South Hall, Gamer Grub's Raphael DiBianco was one of a handful of smaller outfits that got something out of the experience. The game snack pusher told IndustryGamers that while it didn't invest much money into its E3 presence, "we got a lot of bang out of what we did." Still, he joked that the big guys at the show "ostracize the little kids and leave us in the corner." Just be glad, DiBianco, this isn't the E3 of old. Oh, the hazing stories we could tell.
Leipzig benefits from E3 death, gets 40% larger
E3 died and every other convention seemed to benefit. The Game Developers Conference got more exposure this year than ever before and now the 2007 Leipzig Games Convention is filling in their lederhosen and reports a 40% growth. The growth is apparently due to international exhibitors from outside of Germany. It sounds like the Kentia Hall crowd found a new local. Every major gaming company will be in attendance. Despite what Guillemot wants to believe about his Ubiday, Leipzig is the European E3. A bunch of companies are putting more effort into the show, Activision says, "We expect crowds of national and internationa trade visitors ... to be prepared for that, we are expanding our presentation at this year's fair." Fill in that vacuum everyone, there's still plenty of space to fill up in E3's absence.
Min-E3: Even the PR guys don't have a clue what's happening
Min-E3 is a conundrum, wrapped in an enigma, with little to no information getting out at the moment. The approx. 4,000 journalists invited to the event -- a secret selection process made entirely by publishers and not the ESA -- know the general location of where to go in Santa Monica those days in July, but that's it, no further information. That story will come out soon enough, but this is about the PR agencies.Tom Ohle of Evolve PR has written in his personal blog about the legitimate issues faced by smaller companies in this post -"real" -E3 landscape. Without delving into "inside baseball" territory, the old E3 was a general free for all, for better and for worse, but it did get a lot of attention. Reports about Min-E3's shrinkage have a certain level of spin to them, it's not that exhibitors don't want to go -- the new Min-E3 is designed more or less to keep them out. The same scenario that happened to the invite-only journalists is being played out with the exhibitors.Ohle writes, "The event will still allow the industry's biggest publishers to showcase their wares, while effectively cutting the legs out from the rest of the industry ... think of every small company that spent a massive portion of their marketing and PR budget on a booth in Kentia, just so they could get to the one event that allowed them to show their products to a ton of media and retail buyers."
