Convention Plays With Image Again

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E3 is bringing back its wild and crazy side.

One of the largest video game trade shows in the world, E3 ?officially the Electronic Entertainment Expo ?returns to the Los Angeles Convention Center on June 2-4. This time some changes have been made.

The show? floor space has been expanded, booths have been enlarged, and the famous ?ooth babes??models hired by game companies ?will be back.

In 2007 and 2008, the show had experimented with a subdued format. Gone were the booth babes and admission was by invitation only. The changes were made because the event? organizers, the Entertainment Software Association and IDG World Expo Corp., wanted the event to seem more ?usinesslike.?p>But the result was panned as boring by industry watchers and conferencegoers alike. Attendance swooned from more than 60,000 in 2006 to just a few thousand last year. Edward Woo, a video game research analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities Inc. in Los Angeles, put it bluntly: ?t was awful.?p>So now E3 is returning to what it was before, although it? still not open to the public.

Early indicators for the new show are good. A couple of video game publishers that had dropped out of the expo in recent years, including Santa Monica? Activision Blizzard Inc., announced they would participate this year.

ESA issued a recent statement saying it had sold more than 90 percent of its floor space and it was on track to meets its attendance expectation of 40,000.

Woo said this year? show should bring back some of the excitement of old. ?eople go to E3 for the show floor, not the industry meetings,?he said. ?ne of the big problems when they toned it down is they failed to realize this is essentially a big commercial for all these companies. It? a great way for people to get to know your games and generate buzz for the industry.?p>

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