Achtung, ESA!: The 10 Things That E3 Can Learn From the Leipzig Games Convention
8/25/2008 7:43 PM | 1 Comments | Page 3 of 3
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Now that booth babes are back, the show is open 24 hours! Where's the buffet?
With shorter hours at this year's E3, the show became a ghost town each day at 4 p.m. Tumbleweeds practically rolled through the convention center. (The SOE booth was actually being dismantled several hours before E3 closed down this year.) Not so at Leipzig. Each day, the show floor stayed open till a luxurious seven o'clock at night, giving everyone an extra hour or two to squeeze in another demo of
Quantum of Solace.
"The
Spore preview is going to be a bit late, but who cares! Cheers!"
It's not so much the serving of beer that we're asking for; rather, it's the terribly civilized way that members of the press are treated at Leipzig that was the big revelation. Yes, you could buy a beer in the press room (for the low price of one Euro). You were treated like an adult, instead of a barely tolerated nuisance. One more bonus: The press room at Leipzig didn't smell like old sandwiches and feet.
"How the heck did we get to E3? I thought we were in Germany??"
Bigger or smaller? Santa Monica or Downtown? Forget all the painful trying-to-decide-what-we-are fluctuating. Instead, partner up with Leipzig/GCDC, pull the plug on E3, and ask the U.S. press to head to Germany next year. It wouldn't hurt us to get out of the country, and perhaps get a little culture (I saw the church where Bach is buried, which beats the hell out of anything you might see in downtown L.A.).
The hard, cold truth is that maybe E3 has outlived its usefulness. Maybe we don't need E3 anymore. When you see how well the Germans execute a videogame convention, it's very difficult not to think that.
