GDC and more

Game Developers Conference (March 2007):

The oldest trade show and conference dedicated to game developers rather than publishers, the March event will be held in San Francisco this year, which is close to many game publishers and a hop, skip and jump for most of the game enthusiast press. There have been many announcements made at GDC in the past (the original Xbox was first revealed by Bill Gates himself at a keynote address in 2000) and it’s become a bigger event for publishers to show off upcoming products.

Prediction For New E3: Possible. While it’s a tad too early in the year to show off a lot of playable code for the fall season, the demise of E3 in its May position will certainly get publishers to show off some more games than normal at the show to the press, then go back in hiding until the new E3 in July comes around. GDC is always a good way to get attention to upcoming products and we think the San Francisco location and its already huge impact on the gaming industry could continue but we think that it will still be a smaller affair compared to the E3 of old.

San Diego Comic-Con: (July 2007):

When you have a west coast location, an event that has been going on for decades, a 2006 show that had attendance at north of 100,000 people, and a growing number of video and PC game attendees anyway, you already have one of the largest venues for showing off your products. Sony, Nintendo, THQ, Blizzard, NCSoft, Vivendi Games and more attended this year’s celebration of pop culture and you can bet that the 2007 edition could be even bigger in terms of attendance.

Prediction For New E3: Possible. Comic-Con has a ton of things going for it but there’s one more we didn’t mention; it’s possible that the new E3 could be held just before Comic-Con this year, which means that even with its smaller size game publishers could wait until the new E3 to make announcements. That also means the press won’t have as much incentive to attend Comic-Con to check out new builds of games since they might have seen the same games at the new E3. It all depends on how the new E3 is organized and that’s still a big question mark.

QuakeCon (Summer 2007):

id Software has run the totally free game exhibit-LAN party event in Dallas for several years now. This year the show had a slight hiccup with the location and dates only being announced at the last minute but it still got quite a lot of attention. In an interview at the Next Generation web site, id’s Marty Stratton announced that they will have planned for next year’s QuakeCon far more in advance and even speculated that with E3 scaling down other publishers and developers besides the ones id deals with could be invited to attend.

Prediction For New E3: Not Probable. We think QuakeCon is always a fun event and we hope that they will be able to avoid some of their locations problems for 2007 so that more people can plan ahead of time to attend. At the same time we honestly don’t think that companies like EA, UbiSoft and others would be interested in promoting their products at an event run by a competitor, even if its free for anyone to attend. We look forward to attending QuakeCon in 2007 (maybe we will get to see the new id title at the show) but we think it will remain a niche event with little chance of it becoming the new E3.

Consumer Electronics Show’s Game Event: (Spring 2007?)

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas used to be the place where video and PC game publishers showed off their products before the industry decided to go it alone in 1995 with their own E3 show. With E3 now in the midst of a revamp to a smaller show, we were surprised to get a press release from CES’s organizers the Consumer Electronic Association that announced they were exploring ways to create a new gaming oriented trade show for smaller publishers for spring 2007 on the west coast.

Prediction For New E3: Possible. It’s way too early to predict how a show will do when it hasn’t even been officially announced yet but the fact that the group behind the massive CES show is thinking about entering the ring at the same time period that the old E3 used to be held is very intriguing. Can this show avoid the cost problems that the ESA had for the old E3? Will it garner enough publisher support and attendance to become an important event for retailer and press coverage. There is just too little info at this stage to see if this event will be a viable one.

The New E3 (July 2007):

As we have repeated before, the ESA has decided to scale down their annual E3 trade show to a much smaller event, moving out of the LA Convention Center and moving into one or two large (and so far undecided) hotels for the 2007 show that will now be held in July. With attendance now on an invite only basis, the show will certainly be smaller as publishers are now expected to set up shop in hotel suites to show off upcoming products.

Will the New E3 Get Bigger? Possible. We honestly think that having a trade show for the video and PC game industry is a good one and the ESA’s leadership to scale down the event, at least for this year and maybe for the next few years, makes sense, especially since there will not be any new major hardware launches from the console makers for the next few years either. However, when Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo do get ready to unveil the successors to the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii, we also think both the ESA and the publishers will agree to expand E3 beyond just hotel suites around the year 2010 or even earlier. The reason? Mainstream media coverage. When those launches do happen they will want a big venue and a big event to put attention to it and it’s possible E3 will grow back to more of its old self when that time happens.