E3 cancelled?

Opened up the inbox this evening to find this from Souris, aka Hustler of Culture. regarding this news item:

Senior industry sources have revealed to Next-Gen.Biz that the E3 industry event, in its present form, has been cancelled for next year and the foreseeable future

E3 going the way of the Dodo? Hardly sounds possible, does it?

Actually not that surprising. The same surprise came when Comdex died a sudden death a few years back.

At that time, it was "perfect storm' of three damaging factors:

• the escalating price of attending the "one size fits all" uber computer HW/SW show
• the dot-com fallout hit to the economy
• the emergence of many smaller 'specialized' conferences better targeting niches that were growing to enough size to sustain their own conferences (not unlike games did when E3 emerged to excise games from CES.

The factors combining this time seem to be:

• the escalating prices of attending the "one show to rule them all" games event.
• the between-the-gen's hit to the financials of the big publishers
• the emergence of a different 'specialized' conference: the big publishers, and console vendors too, each holding their own partner and press events, timed around specific products, season roadmaps, or given franchise releases tied to movie releases and the like.

The new article claims there will still be some kind of a smaller, scaled back event. It will be interesting to see what the "dwarf star E3" turns out to be, or whether the well has been poisoned enough that people won't support it...