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There’s Just Too Many Damn Game Conferences Today

There’s Just Too Many Damn Game Conferences Today

Gamers love a gigantic spectacle. Heck, almost everything we do is spectacle. Whether it’s the explosions of GTA , the summons of Final Fantasy , or even the serene winds of Flower , we are all looking for some game that will make us go “ooooooh” and “aaaaaah.” So it’s not a surprise that game companies spare no expense to put on the biggest spectacle possible at conferences such as E3, the Tokyo Game Show, and Gamescom.

But how much spectacle is too much spectacle? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to talk about how spectacle is bad for you. We all need a good shiny party now and then. However, spectacle might just be bad for game developers and publishers, specifically their wallets.

Take a scenario where there is one massive video game conference every year. All the major developers pull out all the stops for this one big blowout. Their next year’s lineup is shown in full force, with every major title having its own space on the floor. In a way, this is what we all kind of look at E3 as, at least here in America.

But despite the gigantic international presence at E3, E3 isn’t the only major game conference out there. Tokyo Game Show is the big conference for Japan, and Gamescom is the big conference for Germany and Europe in general. So if major developers want to continue pulling sales from these markets, they also need to make a big spectacle there. That means renting out more booth space, making more demos, hiring more PR representatives, and doing the whole song and dance all over again from the lights to the couches to that horrible dubstep music that EA always plays at their booth.

And if it stopped there, maybe the industry could handle it, but the conference circuit just keeps expanding. We see developer and publisher presences at shows like PAX, and now there are five separate PAXes to go to, one specifically made for developers! We have seen companies hit up fan conferences like MAGfest, anime cons like Otakon, and comic cons like the New York and San Diego Comic Cons. This means more spectacle, more money, and more work.

There’s Just Too Many Damn Game Conferences Today

When you have upward of 7-10 conferences to go to a year, you can’t pull out the stops for each one. Thus, we are starting to see an effect where publishers specifically hold back certain titles at certain conventions. Square-Enix didn’t have a playable version of Final Fantasy XV , Kingdom Hearts 3 , or Star Ocean V at their E3 booth this year, instead telling us to wait for Gamescom. As a result, they spent lots of money on a big booth with very little content inside it. We have seen the same with publishers like Konami, Sega, Bandai Namco, and Capcom in the past, where important games are purposefully withheld from E3 for later conferneces.

This makes sense if you think about it. You can’t just show the same demo at every conference and you can’t make a new demo for every conference or the game will never get done. So each conference needs its own new bomb of an announcement and hot new demo to keep the hype up. So instead of seeing one conference with booths that show off 7-8 new games, we see 7 conferences with booths that show off 1-2 new games. In short, conferences are becoming more boring and are giving us less news, but are costing developers and publishers more money!

I’m not sure there’s an easy solution here. I certainly wouldn’t want to deprive any one region of their major gaming conference. The very fact that there are so many conferences is proof that gaming is becoming bigger and more mainstream. But gaming isn’t growing quick enough to support all of these conferences at once, and I fear if we get too many more, then the very thing that makes them special, the new gaming news and demos, will be drained out of them, leaving nothing but empty spectacle behind.

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