Anonymous asked: It's so weird for me as a viewer and a player of games to hear that E3, from the perspective of people there, is withering away. Because from the outside looking in, it feels like E3 is more popular than ever. People, myself included, LOVE watching the press conferences and livestreams from the floor. It feels in my gut, then, like opening it up to the public should be a huge success. Why do you think it isn't, and what could be done to make it so, you think?

Well, the passes to the show don’t seem to get you very much. You get to walk around a shrinking show floor that seems to have fewer unreleased, playable games on it every year. You also get to sit in audience for a YouTube livestream over at LA Live. All that for $250 (or $1000 if you buy on-site, which hopefully no one did). There’s no automatic press conference access with those passes, as each conference holder seems to have different rules for how they get non-industry people into stuff like that.

So they just seem like a bad value, especially compared to PAX, which has a friendlier show floor, tons of panels to choose from, freeplay spaces, concerts, and so on down the line.

E3 feels caught between the need for an actual annual industry show (that need is still there, but maybe a little less so as time goes on) and the desire for the ESA to make a bunch of money off of the show. Right now it isn’t ideal for any group.



The conferences are alive and well and exciting, but those could happen anywhere, any time. The actual show floor has never felt more dead. You can blame some of that on the slow, awkward transition between consoles we’re entering this year, but the issue is bigger than that. At some point the various exhibiting companies all need to step back and look at what they’re getting for their money. From the outside looking in, that cost seems way too high for the return.

They should probably also take a cue from PAX and only sell day passes instead of show passes. By day 3 the vast majority of the floor was dead. People got their fill of the not-enough-games and expensive food and didn’t see a need to come back unless they were specifically showing up to wait in line to play Pokemon.

I guess I’d put it this way: you love watching the press conferences and livestreams, but it’s way, way harder to see that stuff if you’re actually at the show.

