14 DAY TRIAL // Entertainment Software Association President Douglas Lowenstein confirmed that E3 2007 will indeed take place in July. Starting next year, the event will have its name changed into E3 Media Festival, hinting it may offer more than just games. The expo will no longer be held at the usual Los Angeles Convention Center, but instead it will take place inside conference rooms of at least one hotel in the city. As one might expect, the relocation from the massive LACC means that attendance will be just a fraction of the previous year. More details will follow, as the new E3 takes shape over the next several months.
"E3Expo remains an important event for the industry and we want to keep that sense of excitement and interest, ensuring that the human and financial resources crucial to its success can be deployed productively to create an exciting new format to meet the needs of the industry. The new event ensures that there will be an effective and more efficient way for companies to get information to media, consumers, and others," said Lowenstein in a Wall Street Journal interview.
Around 5,000 people are expected to join the next year's event, way down from the 60,000 mob that stormed the expo just two months ago. The E3 Media Festival will focus on press events and small meetings with media, retail, development, and other key sectors. Lowenstein said the drastic reduction was in response to exhibitor discontent with what the spectacle E3 had become. Several unnamed companies were frustrated because E3 became such a huge and opulent event, that it was increasingly difficult to get their messages out to the public. At least the city greatly benefited from the additional expenses, since it was estimated that the show brings in about $20 million in direct spending by attendees and exhibitors.
Downplaying the role of E3 in favor of individual publisher events is a key factor in its rebirth and it may have some healthy side effects. Publishers usually went through really quiet periods of time, both before and after E3, since major amounts of information were revealed during the event. From now on there will be no real reason to cling to this May time frame and as a result big game announcements, typically were reserved for May, could come sooner or arrive throughout the year at a steady pace.