How E3 got its groove back
Two years ago, the Entertainment Software Association decided that its E3 convention was getting too big and too costly to manage. It changed venues, and tightened admission policies to only allow a select group of attendees. Attendance was upwards of 60,000 in 2006, but in 2007 it was limited to 5,000. Unsurprisingly, a number of studios opted to not even go to the next year's E3, as it would only garner a fraction of its former attention.
This year, attendance rules were somewhat slackened to allow 40,000 attendees (including media), and cable video game channel G4 made its coverage of the events available on Justin.tv as live, free (and commercial free) streams. The decision to stream these events for all to see was a wise one, and Justin.tv counted more than five million total impressions for their live streams of the event's opening press conferences.
Live streaming video coverage looks to have helped E3 to bounce back from two years of waning excitement.
Justin.tv is a pretty high-traffic site on a regular day, pushing out roughly 200 Gbps during peak hours and earning about 500 million unique views a month. However, for the Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, EA, and Ubisoft press conferences, the site saw a huge spike in traffic. At Monday's peak, it had 22,594 simultaneous viewers, ending its broadcast with more than 1.6 million impressions. On Tuesday, it had 23,121 peak simultaneous viewers, and closed out the day with more than 2.4 million impressions. Additionally, the live stream of Steve Wiebe's attempt to break the Donkey Kong high score world record netted an additional 500,000 views.
By comparison, President Barack Obama's inauguration -- which is considered the record holder for most viewed live streaming event -- totaled 17 million impressions on CNN.com, 14 million on MSNBC, and over 5 million on FoxNews.com. CNN.com's previous record holder for most viewed live stream was the November election, which ended with 5.3 million.
Even on Justin.tv, a small site when compared to YouTube and Hulu, in the middle of the "daytime" broadcast time slot, E3 found an online audience bigger than the one that watched the presidential election online.
CBS Interactive's video game site Gamespot.com reports that it too experienced a massive surge in traffic during the first two days of E3, hosting a million live streams on day one, and then two million on day two.
This year E3 is bringing back the excitement," Gamespot.com's Vice President Simon Whitcombe said today. "Our record traffic numbers are a testament to this...as gamers around the world flock to our sites to get the latest news and watch live video from the show floor. We focused this year on getting our audience as close to the action as possible without being here in person."