Game Over for U.K.-based Interactive Entertainment Show
Staff -- Tradeshow Week, 5/16/2005
This fall's ECTS 2005, one of the United Kingdom's largest computer and video game shows, has been canceled. The 53,000 square foot show was pulled from the September calendar for London's Earls Court & Olympia center, according to Nigel Main, a spokesman for the show's management firm, CMP Information, a division of United Business Media.
"It's a reflection of how the market is. We're reviewing options at this stage," Main said.
The show it has collocated with, Game Developers Conference Europe, will take place at the venue as planned, but under management of U.S. sister firm CMP Media, confirmed Philip Chapnick, vice president of CMP Media's applied technologies group. GDC 2006, also run by CMP Media, will take place March 20–24 at the San Jose (Calif.) McEnery Convention Center. However, Main added, the future of CMP Information's SCoRE (held March 6 at Stoneleigh Park in Coventry, England) remains unclear.
New competition is said to have contributed to ECTS' demise. It comes in the form of EGN (European Games Network) in the same early-September dates at another London venue, ExCeL — London's Exhibition & Convention Centre.
The 545,000 net sq. ft. E3/Electronic Entertainment Expo this week at the Los Angeles Convention Center may benefit from ECTS' demise, said Mary Dolaher, vice president of events for the Entertainment Software Assn., because 20 percent of the May 18–20 show's near-65,000 attendees are from abroad. "It wouldn't be any huge sway," she said, "but it may increase it some."
The ECTS show's "timing would have been probably their biggest downfall," Dolaher added, noting that her show's spring dates help exhibitors maintain their production timelines because the schedule forces them to get the games ready.
