Sunday, October 11, 2009

Videogame Expo - kind of a disappointment

The Videogame Expo was held this weekendin Philadelphia, PA. It bill's itself (I"m looking at the logo on my wristband) as America's Videogame Expo.

Well - if that's the case, the videogame industry must be hurting. There are many fewer people here than last year. The number and variety of panels has decreased. There aren't as many exhibitors. Last year's expo had space in both wings of the convention center. The Retro-Con had it's own exhibitor space. Tey had more classic games; this year there's no pacman or ms pacman, no qbert, no lunar lander... This year, the main exhibit hall isn't even full and Nintendo takes up a huge chunk of the front of the hall.

We came for the career seminar that last year had panels on both Saturday and Sunday, including on on pitching your game. This year there are 4 panels including one on picking the best college. Remember me mentioning the dearth of exhibitors above - well, colleges are strangely absent. As are developers and game studios. Granted there aren't as many on the east coast as the west, but where are the ones we do have?

One cool panel - well, we all laughed - was from a voice actor. It was supposed to be about creating characters, but really it was about being a voice actor and creating some characteristics of the character with your voice. Interesting, but not as much info as we expected.

Here's a couple of pictures. Enjoy. Here's a link to a full set of pics I took - click here.





Want more pictures - here's the flickr picture stream labeled "vgxpo" - I don't guarantee they're all from this year's expo, but the most recent ones should be. Click here for the vgxpo stream.

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