Elite Systems in the shadow of South Hall
In the old days of E3, nothing would make us happier than to take a “timeout” to visit the wackiness that was Kentia Hall. If you just wanted to take a break from the glitz, glamour and hectic pace of the show floors in South and West Hall, Kentia allowed for a brief respite while at the same time showcasing some very obscure products. Motion-sensing controllers may be all the rage these days, but we saw motion products years ago in Kentia. It's just that these companies didn't have the capital, innovation or marketing muscle of a Nintendo.
So with E3 back in full swing in 2009, we had hoped that Kentia would make a return as well. Sadly, that was not the case. Instead, many of the companies that clearly would have been in Kentia were relegated to the sidelines in South Hall. We had to wonder if these folks felt abandoned. Was it really worth it for them to even pay to exhibit at E3?
IndustryGamers took a few minutes last week to see what it was like from the little guys' perspective. We were actually quite surprised by what we heard.
Johney Basantani of Basco, a video games wholesaler invested $5,000 in his booth off in the corner of South Hall, but he's quite happy with the return on investment he got from being at E3.
“Lot's of people come through. People eventually make it around the entire hall and see what they want to see and then come by here.”
Girish Manglani of EZ Games Distribution was also happy with the results. He did not reveal how much his booth cost, but we'd assume it was similar to Basco's. “The first two days [the traffic through here] was good. Today was not bad,” he told us on the final day of E3.
Raphael DiBianco of Gamer Grub (a division of Biosilo Foods), which produces snacks for the gamer demographic, was also pleased. Nevertheless, he certainly felt the difference between the haves and have-nots. He noted that he was joking with his colleagues during setup that there are whole “mini-cities” like Nintendo's Wii area and how his booth was “on the edge.” “They ostracize the little kids and leave us in the corner,” he joked.
His company spent a couple grand on free samples to pass out at the show, aside from the price of the extremely small booth, which was around $1,500, and it was apparently worth every penny. “We just launched Gamer Grub to the market and we need to work these trade shows because if we're going to get our product into the hands of the end user, which is the gamer, we've got to make relationships with the trades. It's been great for us because we've met a lot of distributors, a lot of mom and pop shops throughout the nation as well as regional, and then of course big box like GameStop and Best Buy. So for us it has been a good show. We're a start-up company, we're young and we didn't put a lot of money into our booth, but we got a lot of bang out of what we did.”
While this is admittedly a rather small sampling of these minor companies, IndustryGamers is impressed that this new E3 was able to serve the needs of both major players like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, as well as the “no names.” Hats off to the ESA for pushing the reset button on E3.
