Another year, another cramped convention centre in Los Angeles playing host to the console business and its hangers on. It's loud, it's over-the-top, but does it still speak for the games industry as we know it in 2012? Is it a stubborn throwback to the days when consoles ruled the Earth, a show that reluctantly acknowledges the growth in mobile, tablet and online gaming but makes no bones about the preference for a publisher pissing contest? Or is it a show slowly changing with the times, like the creaking console businesses gradually facing a digital, portable future?
The E3 spectacle reverberates through the games business in June every year, but is it still representative and relevant to an industry that has changed almost entirely since the start of the current console cycle? Here, in our latest roundtable, GamesIndustry International's writers drape press passes over their shoulders and wade through the halls of the LA Convention Centre…
James Brightman
"E3 is beginning to feel a bit like a dinosaur, a relic of a past golden age"
James Brightman
The games industry has changed dramatically since the first E3 Expo in 1995, put together by the Interactive Digital Software Association (now the Entertainment Software Association). Why, then, hasn't the annual trade fair evolved with it? The world of consoles isn't the only game in town in 2012, and yet only a handful of exhibitors at E3 are purely social/mobile focused. Truth be told, E3 is beginning to feel a bit like a dinosaur, a relic of a past golden age.
That's not to say that consoles are dead, and that E3 is fundamentally useless. E3 still serves its purpose as the grand spectacle that it is, drawing huge attention to the industry for a few days each year, and preparing journalists, retailers and retail buyers for the upcoming holiday season. But the fact is that it's misrepresenting what the games industry actually is today. Whereas GDC appears to be broadening its scope and shining a spotlight on social and mobile companies, E3 almost seems to be doing the opposite. Like an ostrich with its head plunged into the sand, the ESA seems oblivious to this.
David Radd
The painful on-stage scripted banter is enough to make you cringe yourself inside out.
E3 is still a very important event to the AAA gaming industry. When it was running in a diminished form for a couple of years, it left a hole where a lot of positive mainstream media coverage usually emerged from. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft benefit hugely from the attention on their press conferences and it's still the best place for people in the games industry to meet and hash out business.
However, E3 has not done a good job of representing the entirety of what gaming is these days. Indie, mobile and social titles are hugely underrepresented. Also, the importance of the event has been diminished by major publishers making announcements at other times of the year. Since they no longer have to represent themselves to a large number of buyers (the true reason E3 was created) they show off games on their own timetable and often at their own events. Finally, other major industry events, sort of "mini-E3s" have stolen some of the thunder of E3 (like Gamescom, Tokyo Game Show, PAX and the Eurogamer Expo) allowing publishers to have multiple touchpoints with consumers and not try to cram all their major announcements in one week in June.
E3 still represents a part of the gaming market worth billions of dollars, and it's value in the intangibles for that part of the industry is such that it will likely still occur for the rest of the decade. However, the event faces obsolescence if it doesn't include much more than the largest, most expensive titles in an industry about so much more than retail these days.
Ben Strauss
I'm still iffy on why there seems to be continued discussion on the 'end of E3' as we know it. The lineup this year from all three big publishers, all three manufacturers and a goodly amount of PC and mobile developers look pretty darn impressive. I mean sure, the landscape is continuing to change, but for companies to blow off E3? That's for Valve and Blizzard to do. For everyone else, this is the Super Bowl (and Valve and Blizzard only show up when they intend to steal the show).
E3 is just going to see old hands leave and new talent come in, and on different platforms. More attention will eventually be paid to mobile titles, less (if any) attention to an utterly useless middle-market. This isn't about a drastic change - this is about ebb and flow. This talk comes up at the end of each generation it seems, and I don't see this being another early '80s scenario for gaming. Next year will more than likely kill any of this discussion.
Steve Peterson
The answer is contained within the question; once you find it necessary to ask if E3 is still relevant, it is apparent that it's not as relevant as it was. More precisely, E3 is both more relevant and less relevant than it once was.
E3 is more relevant to publishers of console games, who are facing the fourth year of a declining market and the most perilous hardware transition in 20+ years. E3 is their best chance to draw attention to their products and boost their company image to the mainstream media; it's
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