G4's E3 Coverage (and pretty much everyone else, for that matter)

[PJeigh]

I'm curious as to what everyone thinks about the E3 coverage?

IMO, everyone concentrated far too much on the games and the Wii. Sure, games are the cool part, and the Wii's controller was on display (finally), but it's the Electronics Entertainment Expo, not the Video Games and Video Game Systems PR Festival.

There's an entire hall of smaller companies that are developing new technologies, publications, and other electronic entertainment products that was essentially passed over. Where's that coverage? G4 gave it one small (2-4 min.) segment in its 12 hours of "live" coverage with Gilbert Godfried pretty much skipping over anything useful to be sarcastic and annoying. I didn't need to see every G4 staffer playing the Wii. See it once, don't really need to see it again and again and again and again and again.

I went through the 12 hours of G4 coverage with my TiVo and the new, useful content was slightly less than one hour. I'm sure it had a lot had to do with available beta rolls and agreements with certain game companies, but come on ... <1 hour? Silly banter and intro-to-intro-to-person talking should only go on for so long.

 

[scribe999]

Well, not that convention coverage on television is ever that enthralling, but the big bucks are always on the big titles and the big consoles. Now, I've never been to E3, but over the years just paying attention to it, the level of commercialism kinda procludes a lot of all of those extra nuggets of non-Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo goodness from being visible.

Basically, Kentia Hall (where they relegate all the small timers) is supposed to be the graveyard of crap where Korean-made game peripherals with badly translated documentation sit there waiting for the occasional journalist to wander on over after every optic and aural nerve is destroyed by the main show floors. I'd let the guys from Mygamer.com who visited E3 go into detail about that.

Since G4 (and everyone else) is a commercial enterprise, they have to budget what time they have to include the stuff that will draw in the most viewers. Gilbert Godfried, despite being a mistake, is still more interesting to me than talking about a cheap Guitar Hero knockoff in Kentia. Video game inovation has become incredibly expensive, and only the showy glitziness of a Halo3 trailer (or something like it) will bring in enough ratings, web surfers and subscribers for G4 and web and print publications so they can adjust ad sales rates for greater revenue. Nature o' the beast I'm afraid.