E3 Media Festival

The E3 Media Festival will take place some time in early July, which should separate the event from Comic-Con, an event that continues to grow each year with more gaming and Hollywood support. The new event, which will be located in two main hotels in LA, will cater to about 5,000 media, analyst and retail representatives. Game companies like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are expected to still host press conferences at this event, but the entire festival will take place over three days only. Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, told me he expects there to still be parties, press conferences and big news surrounding the event, but it will be a much smaller venue than the 60,000-plus extravaganzas of the past.

It will be interesting to see how the smaller game companies, which were often tucked away in Kentia Hall or some small meeting area, are impacted by the new format. For that matter, even the bigger companies, who have held pre and post E3 events for media at their own headquarters in recent years, will likely treat this event differently. For example, EA normally hosts a media day in Redwood Shores every July to show better builds of E3 games. Does it still need to have a separate day?

Lowenstein said the move away from the convention center came from the ESA members. Online reports have said key game studios like Sony, Microsoft, EA and THQ balked at the exorbitant costs of the show, especially when factoring in the negative press early builds were generating. Lowenstein also said he expects full support from the game companies for this event.

It seems that even a down-sized E3 Media Festival will still have some of the problems that plagued E3 from a PR standpoint. If every major company is showing new games that week, how do you separate your announcements from the crowd? It's this one-week of announcements mentality that lead many companies to host their own events away from LA at different times throughout the year. When Capcom holds its annual Las Vegas event in Q1, all the news that appears on Gamespot, IGN and around the Web that day focuses on Capcom games. At E3, Capcom was competing with every other game company in the world. And even from a scale-back perspective, it will still be vying with other game publishers for attention.

The three companies that always gained the most press from E3 are Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. But do these giants need to compete with each other on the same two days for news? Why can't Sony have its own day to trumpet PS3 and PSP and show games in good playing form? What's to stop Microsoft, which has its own X06 event for Europe that focuses solely on Xbox 360, from having a similar day in the U.S. away from E3? Does it really make sense for these three giants to compete for headlines in the same week?

One of the main ideas behind E3 when it was launched 12 years ago was to trumpet the videogame industry. While games still aren't given the same respect as movies or TV in mainstream media formats, they've come a long way. Networks like MTV, SpikeTV and even The History Channel are covering games or integrating games into programming. Does the one-week concept for all news still make sense today?

Keith Boesky, former head of Eidos, told me that he was really impressed with E3 this past year and the mainstream coverage it was getting. I was impressed by the way game sites were streaming live video from the show floor, much of it in HD. Gamers around the world were able to experience the show from their own PCs or Xbox 360s. It's not likely that this aspect will change. Whatever happens at the new E3 will be piped into homes from sites like AOL, Gamespot and IGN.