Life After E3

My latest column for IGN Insider is up. Most people don't know I write for IGN Insider. This is because you have to pay them money before you can read the content. This is why I generally don't link to these articles here (or anything else behind a subscriber wall, really).

However, I did say something that I kind of liked, about E3, and wanted to clip it for you:

While the spin from the ESA is that the event has been "reconfigured" or "downsized" or (my favorite) "evolved", ask yourself: what does "E3" mean to you? Does it mean quiet meetings in small hotel rooms? No: it's a massive show floor pulsing with light, sound, and people. That's E3. And that's gone.

That there will now be a tiny, 5,000-person event in Los Angeles this July branded with the E3 name means very little. It's as if THQ issued a press release last week that said that the Xbox 360 version of The Sopranos hasn't really been cancelled – why, it's just "evolved" into a PlayStation 2 game. See? By that logic, nothing is ever cancelled, ever.