QuakeCon to Pick Up E3’s Slack
Recently, E3 has announced changes to the focus of E3 2007 from a large media-oriented trade show to a business-centric, intimate conference. It seems that E3 has said it no longer wants to be the trade show event where the best and brightest in the video game industry come to show off their latest work.
Which will be the one must-attend trade show for video game enthusiasts in the future? One unlikely candidate may be QuakeCon.
In an interview at CES 2007 with GameInformer, John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead hint at the possibility of taking some of the 55,000 displaced attendees from E3 this year. They discussed changes being made to the QuakeCon format including plans to move towards a trade show format where exhibitors buy 10x10’s and sponsors can throw money at tournaments.
Hollenshead: We’re changing the way it works, too. As opposed to having everybody who is a vendor being effectively a sponsor of the event, we’re basically going to the E3 or GDC methodology of booth space. You’ll get a space, like if it’s ten by ten, it’s $2,500 and it goes from there.
Carmack: So we won’t have someone from Intel bitching about having an AMD poster, and vice versa.
Hollenshead: We do want to have certain aspects of the event sponsored, for example a tournament sponsor. You don’t have to be an exhibitor to be a sponsor or vice versa. You can be one or the other or whatever it is that you want to do. We are making it more like—at least for the exhibitors, vendors and sponsors—a traditional trade show. Part of it is with changes to E3, we see an opportunity to raise the profile of the event and also, as John said, we’ve had issues in the past where if Nvidia has a partnership with AMD and we have Intel as a sponsor then Intel gets upset with AMD logos in the Nvidia booth.
Now that E3 has announced plans to move from a 60,000 attendant state-of-the-industry event to a 5000-person business meeting, QuakeCon and other industry events have room to grow. Many industry insiders have voiced their concern over the change, as many saw E3 as the one and only place where everyone got together to see what each other were doing.
Originally a LAN party and tournament series presented by id Software, QuakeCon has developed into a major event featuring exhibits, roundtables and huge prizes in sponsored tournaments. QuakeCon also has traditionally been mostly hardcore/FPS gamer-focused. With the QuakeCon demographic combined with a trade-show format and a major push towards media coverage, QuakeCon could vie with GDC and the DICE Summit for the media spectacle left over from E3 this year.
It may be a while before independent developers are making it big at QuakeCon, and the mainstream news is covering the event, but this move by QuakeCon towards a trade-show is a step in the right direction.
