Electronic Entertainment Expiration

The announcement has come forth that the Electronic Entertainment Exposition (E3, or Mecca, for some) has been cancelled. Penny Arcade summed it up thus:

Acting as their own outlets, publishers get much more reliable data about the efficacy of their marketing payload. Trying to project their unsullied, carefully manicured marketing message at E3 is essentially like putting a choice morsel in the bottom of a burlap sack, and then filling the bag with cats. You swing the bag around and around, at which point dizzy felines emerge. Did it work? Hard to say. Oh! Also, the sack costs forty million dollars.

I can understand the reasoning and yet, like many other people, I have to admit a bit of disappointment. E3 was about more than the spectacle, it was like the Super Bowl and Christmas all rolled into one. Of course, it probably cost double what either event did.

One hopes that gaming schedules will even out after a while. I remember when working on projects about three jobs ago that getting something ready to E3 was itself a milestone. No matter what else was going on, you had to have something to show no matter how ready it was. Given the extended development cycles on modern consoles, and the difficulty of getting any project approved with so much cost, I can see why the industry as a whole would want to remove such a stumbling block to getting products out the door.

It used to be that there was feast or famine: lots of stuff around E3 and Christmas, diddly squat for the other ten months of the year. Which is stupid and leads to a lot of games being swept under the rug.

So while I never went to E3, I knew a lot of people who did. I used to get buckets of swag from their trips, too. Somewhere in my desk is a set of Metal Gear Solid dog tags, now that I think of it. The Pod Racer 64 t-shirt long dissolved into nothingness.

Currently listening to the soundtrack to Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica. I'm trying to be really good and avoid any and all spoilers for the upcoming season. All I've heard is that it will be "darker than anything we've done before."

This from the show that produced Lay Down Your Burdens. At this rate every viewer is going to require extensive therapy or massive doses of Cute Overload just to get through the day.