Shorth

E3: Biggest Gaming Event

The Electronic Entertainment Expo is often regarded as the world’s largest convention for video games. Computer game developers are presenting their latest games during this convention, and this event is known for fancy decorations and pyrotechnics. E3 is a very important event, but lately the opinion of many people seemed to change. Last year many important publishers and developers announced that they won’t be attending. Those companies included Activision/Vivendi, NCsoft, Foundation 9, and a lot of the big players which were expected to be there. Activision/Vivendi stated that they will not be renewing its membership with the trade body at all. Additionally, the number of attendees got reduced from tens of thousands to just a few thousand. It became an invitation-only event, and therefore the popularity of it is likely to decline each passing year. It will be almost impossible to have as many attendees as in other years like, for example, 2005 when there were 70,000 visitors. On the bright side, there are some rumors that E3 might be again reopening to the public in some way during 2009. Time will tell whether that will be true or not. So far it has been stated that all “qualified computer and video game industry audiences” will be allowed.
Let’s hope that this year will make E3 popular once again, but so far it seems that might not be the case. On the other hand, there are several smaller expositions which are slowly gaining popularity.