E For All Gets E for Effort
The weekend is over and I am here in my hotel room awaiting my plane home and reflecting on E for All. Having reached the end of a three month stint of traveling and attending various conferences I am admittedly a little exhausted and kind of done with the whole con thing for a while. However, I have been to enough of them now to be able to judge them pretty fairly.
E for All was an interesting animal. The folks who put it together obviously put a lot of effort and money into it, but I can't help feeling that some of it could have been put in different directions. Obviously they had no real control over which publishers chose to attend and in the end, that was the event's biggest downfall. The publisher booths that were there were definitely nice and had a decent selection of games, but when you can count the number of attending publishers on one hand, it does not bode well. The majority of the booths while nice, tended more towards peripherals, various websites and software vendors. The press room was one of the nicest I'd been in and huge to boot, but unfortunately I never even saw it even 1/8 full and when I looked around I saw a guy looking at hardcore porn and another playing WoW.
I will be very interested to see if the event happens again next year given that the general consensus of the attending showers was that it was rather lightly attended. Rumor has it that they are planning on doing it at the same time as PAX next year which I think would ultimately put the final nail it's already tightly nailed shut coffin. The key to success for future E for Alls will not be competing with a really cool established event, but in trying their best to get as many publishers as they possibly can to attend.
All this said, I was glad to be able to interview Igarashi and Yamaoke and check out Brawl and a few other titles. I just hope that if they do decide to go ahead with it again that they learn from the mistakes made this year and present an event that won't leave attendees feeling that they only needed to buy a one day pass.
Fruit Brute
Posted to Miscellany on 22 October 2007
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: e for all, effort, hopefull, sparse
Who the hell feels the need to look at hardcore porn at a press event? That baffels the mind. Did he whip it out too?
He was probably just checking his email. I don't say that flippantly; there are thousands upon thousands of Yahoo groups that will happily send you any kind of pr0n you could ever want. I spent about 2 hours earlier this morning unsubscribing my late partner from several hundred of them that were producing 4 or 5 gigs a week of mail.
...at least we got some sort of public "E3" version this year.
The only way we got to play brawl and other major arrivals.
Yeah, it was kind of small and could've done a lot better, but it was its first time. I think it did great for it being the very first time.