Why the Video Games Industry is Losing It
July 30, 2007Which got more publicity, the open-to-the-public Comic Con this weekend in San Diego, or the industry-only E3 videogame convention at an airport hangar in Santa Monica earlier this month?
Comic Con, hands down, because they celebrated the fan–and because the movie studios flocked there to show off new films like IronMan with big guns like star Robert Downey Jr., director Jon Favreau, and 80-year old creator Stan Lee. That’s word of mouth you can’t buy–and the kind of publicity the ‘new’ E3 for the business guys, not the gamers, no longer gets.
E3 sharply decelerated from 2006 to 2007, braking from 65 (thousand) attendees down to 3 (thousand and severly limiting the number of press. ComicCon, by contrast, was by and for the fan boys E3 expelled; 124,000 showed up, forty times the video games ‘crowd.’
Keeping out the gamers who want to try the games is a riduculous strategy; no wonder the number one selling game in the U.S. is a kid’s game for Gameboy, Pokemon Diamond. The teenagers are all out watching movies based on comics and fantasy, from Fantastic Four and Transformers to the Simpsons.
Robert Downey Jr in “Iron Man.”