Where’s P.T. Barnum When You Need Him?

I haven’t heard much news lately about the reincarnation of E3. I’m kind of curious to see what news comes out about that in the near future. I would think that there’d have to be some kind of concrete indication soon what is planned for the “big show”.

But it’s not only E3 that is due for some changes. As has been posted elsewhere (and in a more timely fashion than this post, God knows), the Austin Game Conference has been acquired by the GDC folks, aka CMP. Additionally, a new conference has been kick-started, going by the name of the Online Game Development Conference, to be held in Seattle.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve volunteered to serve as an advisor to the OGDC, though that’s neither here nor there for the purpose of this post. What I’m curious about is where these various shows are going and what the attendees of them want to see. Is there room for another conference covering online games, given that AGC pretty much went for that theme? Will CMP’s acquisition of AGC change how they run GDC? Can I fit some more acronyms in here?

In any case, I certainly hope that we see some changes in the tracks at these conferences like GDC / AGC / OGDC. Certainly GDC has typically managed to pull down some big names for lectures and seminars and such, but looking over past programs and comparing it with what AGC was doing, it seems rather repetitive. Granted, it’s a personal bias, but I’d like to see more HR content and more variety in the communication tracks, for starters.

I think that it’s not only E3 that needed an overhaul (and it’s questionable that they’re overhauling E3 in the right way, but that’s another story), but also these other shows could use some serious tweaking. And in the case of OGDC, there’s an interesting opportunity there, in a blank canvas kind of way.