Embracing Convention

E3, in a sense, will always be the spiritual home of the videogames industry. Based on the west coast of the United States along with many of the publishers which dominate the market, this orgiastic spectacle of noise, flashing lights and incredibly awful convention centre food is likely to be the hub around which the industry's calendar rotates for many years to come.

As such, the unending string of events which are set up by the press or by their organisers as a "local E3" for their territory are always bound to compare unfavourably with the real thing. British events such as the now-deceased ECTS and the Game Stars Live / EGN duo, also since deceased, only ever invited ridicule when compared to the scale of E3, and even the long-running Tokyo Games Show pales alongside the annual jamboree in Los Angeles.

The thing about those events is that, by comparison with E3, they are all resolutely local - to the extent of being almost parochial in some respects, especially when you look at smaller shows such as Korea's fascinating, but heavily locally focused, G*. E3 may be the trade show for North America, but it also has a fair stab at being the trade show for the world, serving as it does as the venue for any technology, IP or platform hoping to break into the worldwide market to strut its stuff.

As such, we're not going to do the disservice to Games Convention of calling it "Europe's E3" or anything equally hackneyed. However, the meteoric rise of this event, located in the small German city of Leipzig, is worth both of praise and examination, as this year it will once again be Europe's largest videogames event - and, in terms of visitor numbers, easily one of the largest in the world.

Despite being mostly ignored by the world media in the early years - a product as much of being focused on the large but very specialised German games market as of being an event run in a non English speaking country, and thus passing under the radar of the bulk of the international games press - Games Convention has grown dramatically to the point where this year, it will welcome 150,000 consumers through its doors over the four days of the expo, as well as running a developer's conference and a media / trade day.

Crucially, exhibitor numbers are also expected to be high - with the event's organisers this week confirming that 367 companies have signed up for the event, a tally which bodes well for the cross-industry acceptance of the event.

All that remains is for the industry to start taking Games Convention as seriously as an event touting such impressive figures deserves - and on this front, too, progress is being made. This is by far the largest and most important event in the calendar for the European videogames market, and is by no means solely a German event any more. Companies in the UK, in France and in all of the other European markets are gradually waking up to the fact that GC is the trade and consumer show which is carrying the flag for the entire continent, and given the strategic timing of the event just a few weeks before the autumn / winter sales frenzy kicks in, this is absolutely the most vital event in terms of getting key products and announcements in front of European consumers and media.

From a British perspective, many people will bemoan the fact - privately or in public - that Europe's premier trade and consumer event is taking place in Germany, rather than in the United Kingdom. The reasons for that are many - internal politicking over the running of events in this country have killed many promising events stone dead, for a start, and this has utterly eroded industry confidence in new events which are proposed here. More importantly, events in the UK have never really managed to look beyond the UK for their audiences, and despite the excellent transport links between London and the Continent, little effort has been made at attracting genuinely international audiences to events in this region.

However, it's important for the UK's industry not to fall into the trap of considering Games Convention to be something that's happening "over there" - while the UK may be the largest individual component of the European market, it is nonetheless part of that market, and Game Convention is the event which has grown to have the size and potential to represent the UK market as well as Continental markets. Obviously the focus for UK firms is different - few UK consumers will make the trip this year, after all, although who is to say that this won't change in future? - but only in geographic terms is the UK an island from the rest of Europe, and a strong European event will benefit every territory in the region, regardless of which country hosts it.