E3 or Bust... A Marketing Nightmare

Like many fellow geeks not able to attend this years famous E3 I’ve been picking up the headlines from my handy little RSS feed. I continue to watch as all the latest and greatest toys, gadgets, games and other such info come streaming in from this once a year event.

To be honest, I’ve never been to an E3 before, and after this year, I don’t think I want to. I’ve been reading headline after headline like “this company released this, and that company released that” and personally, I just don’t care anymore. Everyone is trying to “one-up” the next company and I’m getting sick of it. Why all at one time, all during the same week? Why?

I’m no marketing major, and personally I never really found the subject very interesting. I’ve never liked marketing campaigns for the most part, except the rare marketing campaign that is just pure genius, like the Axe deodorant campaign for “Gamekillers” is pure genius, but these video game geeks don’t know how to market worth crap.

It’s like putting a bunch of hungry piranhas in a tiny little jar. Everyone’s trying to compete with each other in a public arena. Everyone’s got the latest and greatest. Everyone is “next gen”. What the hell does “next gen” mean anymore? Wasn’t PS2 and X-Box “next gen”, so wouldn’t this gen be “gen 3”.

Well, technically speaking it would be “gen 11” if you count up all the times the consoles have been released in waves with each other, but I won’t get into that.

Back to what I was saying…

I can understand going to an event like this to rub shoulders with some of the greatest icons in the industry, but do you really have to pay a couple hundred bucks just to get in on the showroom floor. That doesn’t include airfare or hotel prices, but I believe that goes without saying, this event is sounding more and more retarded to me!

At any given moment I could pick up the phone and start calling around and eventually get in touch with a person who knows a person and work my way up to the top of the food chain if I ever felt like I had something to say to these people. If I ever wanted to listen to what they say I could just type in their name into a search engine and read up on what they have to talk about and that would satisfy me. What brings these people to this event?

Ah, yes, the media. There’s tons of media there. Practically every major news outlet has a crew there anticipating the Microsoft or Sony press release. Some of them may actually even listen to the EA speech, but I think everyone is kinda sick of hearing… “And this generation of sports games will have butt cheeks that twitch more realistically thanks to our overworked and underpaid software engineers and our sweat shops overseas”…

Oh crap, I did it again, I slammed EA. My bad! I hope no one from EA is reading this, specifically the wonderful “new” Tiberian team.

Lots and lots of media are currently camped happily outside the event awaiting the next big press release from the large companies. No one actually cares about the little guys, at least not by my understanding.

As one of my friends pointed out; “Occasionally someone will stop by the lesser known companies booths and chat for a while, but most of the time it’s merely…” as my friend playfully changed his voice deeper to imitate a marketing or business major “‘Hey, what do you guys do, not that I actually care. I have two hours to kill before my next seminar, not that I’m actually interested in your product, but do you have a free t-shirt?’” … Those are the guys leftover from the big internet boom. I thought we got rid of them?

Okay, I’ve got an idea. Instead of doing this one week thing where the public has to pay to see this event, we build a theme park. Seriously, we can have Fox news, Reuters, as well as Computer Gaming Magazine or whatever else is popular in the printed world. Perhaps we can even have a few people from a couple of the lesser known news sites. Oh, we have to have some people from Slashdot there! We take all these reporters and have them sort through piles of press releases while outside the large companies get to demonstrate their latest technology all year round to the masses… sound good?

We’ll even throw in the after parties, the babes, the booze, and the schmoozing!

Oh, wait. Someone beat me to this idea… Vegas!
-Ken Noland