The 2012 E3 Expo is now less than a month away. The E3 Expo is a fantastic event, full of spectacle, huge announcements, and a great way to see and sometimes get your hands on games and devices that will be hitting stores shelves later in the year and into the next. The Married Gamers have attended the event for a few years now, but this year we won’t have a presence on the show floor for a few reasons. To our readers and listeners, don’t fret! The Married Gamers will continue to provide dynamic coverage of the announcements and news coming out of E3 Expo, but we won’t be hustling from one hall to another to get from one appointment to another.
So why won’t we be on the floor of Expo this year? We have some very good reasons. While we didn’t submit any media credentials this year, starting last year it has become very hard for small indie websites to get press badges for the expo. To their credit the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has put together the world’s most important video game trade show year after year. The event dominates the local area and has become the place where most game publishers make new announcements about forthcoming games and devices. Its success has lead to larger and larger crowds, including more media. Now to get a media badge sites must have certain metrics to qualify, which has lead to some great indie sites being cut out or given just one badge which makes covering a large trade show exceptionally hard. I feel that smaller sites and enthusiast media (podcasts, video bloggers, or Youtube channels) offer unique perspectives that that larger sites can’t or won’t include in their coverage. It’s a shame that such sites can be included but I am hopeful that in the future the ESA might use different qualifications to include such voices.
The biggest reason why we won’t on the trade show floor? ROI, Return on Investment. Late last year I came to a realization, E3 Expo just hasn’t become cost effective for a site such as ours. Between hotel costs, meal costs, transportation, not to mention the unseen costs of lining up appointments and such we spend quite a bit of money. While E3 is awesome to see “the new shineys,” many times during appointments since the game or device was just announced the most common answer we’d get from game publishers was “We’re not talking about that yet.” It’s frustrating but understandable. The games industry spoon-feeds news about their games when it fits their marketing cycle. When a company announces a game, marketing will not show you everything. They want to keep up interest in their games from announcement until it hits the store shelves. And yes, sometimes PR can’t say anything yet because frankly the game is still in development and those aspects of the game haven’t been finalized yet. The result for us internally is that we spend lots of money to be able to see and maybe play something we can’t really know much about.
Money is at the heart of why The Married Gamers won’t be attending this year’s E3 Expo. Personally, I’m fine with it. I am thankful that we’ll have press releases flooding our e-mail inbox, live web feeds of several of the Media Briefings, great sites indie sites like GamingAngels and Gamertag Radio, and social media to get a feel for what going on. Instead I’ll wait a month to get more answers out of PR and marketing at the San Diego Comic Con, and loads more at events like PAX Prime. I look at it as working smarter with the resources we have and until costs go down or how game companies market their games my feet might not touch the carpeted floor of the fantastic E3 Expo.
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