Latest E³ Summit Gets a Mixed Review

Santa Monica, Calif.—The crowd wasn't pushing to maintain precious space on a packed showfloor. No one had a two-hour wait to catch a glimpse of the latest new hardware product. Gone were the triple-decker booths, loud speaker systems and booth babes that defined E³/Electronics Entertainment Expo.

Instead, this year's show, the invitation-only E³ Media & Business Summit at hotels and Barker Hanger in Santa Monica, Calif., featured companies holding meetings in rented hotel suites and a drastically shrunken showfloor with stations where attendees tested games.

"It's definitely a different show," said Howard Liebeskind, director of creative services with THQ, based in Agoura Hills, Calif.

The announcement of the new format came from the Entertainment Software Assn. last summer when it decided the former TSW 200 show would downsize to better fit the gaming industry's needs.

Just how different the show was from 2006 was a point of concern with exhibitors and attendees.

For Charles Bellfield, vice president of marketing for Universal City, Calif.-based Codemasters, what was missing were the eight retailers that make up 80 percent of his company's business, including Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and GameStop.

"I do think we need all the key components," he added.

Bellfield also disliked the show being spread out among several hotels — located in a way that made walking between them difficult — and Barker Hanger, a couple miles from the hotels. It caused several missed meetings because of miscalculated travel time on shuttles, he added.

"We need a venue that can house five to 10 thousand people," Bellfield said.

But, he also wouldn't want to return to the previous format of E³ either, held in the Los Angeles Convention Center with companies competing to outspend each other for the biggest and most elaborate booths.

"The old E³ became a behemoth," he added. "I think the balance between the two (formats) we haven't yet reached."

Many exhibitors and retailers echoed Bellfield's comments, citing the lack of retailers at the show as a problem they want to see remedied. One retailer estimated 95 percent of the buying power in the industry wasn't there.

"This is probably a press event only," Bellfield, an exhibitor, said.

Liebeskind reiterated that statement but viewed the show in a more positive light — as a way for developers to showcase their products to the press.

Stanley Phan, public relations specialist for eidos, based in Redwood City, Calif., agreed: "It produces more confirmed coverage."

He noted a lot of the retailers in attendance, including Hollywood Video and Midwest retail chain Meijer, did have meetings at the eidos suite. Most of the bigger retailers probably were waiting to see how the new format would play out, Phan added.

Attendees at the show greeted each other on shuttles and sought their peers' opinions on the changed format. Most expressed at least a little nostalgia for the old E³, citing the relative lack of excitement, or "pomp and circumstance," as Robert Taylor referred to it.

"As a general consumer, I greatly preferred the old format," added Taylor, junior publicist for Santa Monica-based Activision, makers of "Call of Duty" and "Guitar Hero." This was his second show with an exhibiting company, but his sixth or seventh as a participant.

"I think people just have to realize that the old format is dead, and we need to move forward," Liebeskind said. THQ planned to hit retailers in a different way, visiting their offices to introduce the company's portfolio. Otherwise, Liebeskind said, THQ employees were seeing the people they needed to see in their hotel suite.

"The reason they did this was to stop that arms race," he added, of companies spending millions of dollars each year for competing booths.