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PAX, Tokyo Game Show & EGX 2016 – Events media coverage

Following up on the blog post looking at the media coverage of E3 and gamescom, I wanted to do one on the “September Events”. The month was rich in games industry events, and I want to try to keep this series of articles as regular as possible to provide more context around the benefits of attending different events, from a media/PR point of view.

As usual, you can read about the tool and methodology here.

And take this with a pinch of salt, as always. Media coverage shouldn’t be the only reason to attend any event. And it’s also sometimes beneficial to be the biggest announcement of a smaller event rather than one-in-a-million at E3.

PAX West 2016

Going by chronological order, the PAX main event (even if it is getting challenged by PAX East), renamed PAX West this year after being PAX Prime for so long, took place early September in Seattle.

Collecting data prior to 2015 proved complicated this time around, so I only look at this year and the previous one.

Overall coverage is lower, but stayed in the same order of magnitude. PAX being an American event, I was more curious about the coverage spread across different languages.

The year-on-year coverage stayed the same for English media, but there were fewer articles mentioning the event in Italian and German media. Looking at the media coverage, it seems there were fewer larger AAA games present at this year’s event, or at least, there were fewer announcements around the event. The fact that overall coverage in English stayed about the same should be seen as a sign that the event stayed strong despite fewer key news beats taking place at the show.

Tokyo Game Show

Next in line, the main games event in Japan, the Tokyo Game Show (TGS for short) started on the 15th September.

With Sony having its PlayStation Meeting earlier in the month in New York, it deprived the TGS from announcements that would have been done there in previous years. Sony still held a press conference during TGS, but it didn’t get as many headlines as the one from the previous year.

The major announcements for 2016 were related to the Final Fantasy games, the new Resident Evil, and the controversy around the new Metal Gear title (and it being disavowed by Hideo Kojima).

When looking at the EFIGS coverage, there is a surprising balance between the amount of articles referring to TGS in French, Italian, German and Spanish.

The international appeal of the TGS is clear when looking at the distribution of the EFIGS coverage. Interesting to note that the English media are the only ones that covered this year’s edition more than last year’s.

EGX

Coming last in September was EGX. The event is very much geared towards consumers, but benefits from being the largest games event in the UK, with local studios using it as a platform for their own announcements. This year, the latest Yooka-Laylee trailer (that includes Shovel Knight as a guest star) was probably one of the biggest announcements tied to the event.

After seeing a significant growth in coverage from 2014 last year, this year’s media mentions of the event saw a slight decline. EGX 2015 saw a lot of media attention due to some of the comments made by Sony’s president Shuhei Yoshida.

Unlike the more internationally covered PAX West and TGS, EGX is mostly covered and mentioned by English speaking media. The amount of coverage in French is actually surprisingly low considering that the event is still a vehicle for announcements that see significant relay in other languages.

Comparing the reach

As a last exercise, I compared the actual number of unique English websites that covered each event, as a way to compare their reach and presence in that media landscape that is less reliant on the number of news beats relayed at the event.

It is quite interesting to see PAX being at the level of TGS, and while EGX is significantly behind, it is not an insurmountable gap. In 2014, there were 143 unique English websites reporting on TGS, by then already a very well established event. I can see EGX reaching similar numbers in a couple of years if they keep building their profile as a good platform for reaching media and the right people in the industry.

October 4, 2016/0 Comments/by Thomas BIDAUX

PR Intelligence

Paris Games Week 2015 – Media coverage

Going back as promised on this year’s game events and their media coverage, today I am looking into the early results of the Paris Games Week held from 28th of October to the 1st of November.

This year’s event was particularly interesting as it was chosen to host the Sony media conference instead of the one usually held during gamescom.

Last time around I used a formula looking at the key 20 days of different events, so the numbers I am showing today are a bit short for the Paris Games Week (PGW). I had to make a choice about getting the same numbers but publishing in a few weeks (I am away in Korea to attend Gstar and have meetings with clients) and publishing this week with a partial outlook. Considering the partial numbers are already very telling, it seems like a better idea to make this post while the event is still fresh in everyone’s mind.

Scale of PGW 2015

Using the same numbers for all the recent events as the last time, the results are very interesting:

The PGW 2015 edition has seen a massive growth in its media coverage – it has grown over 500% compared to last year alone. There is no doubt the Sony press conference played a key role (more on that later), and its takes the event close to the size of the main GDC event.

However, it is still a way from the media coverage we can see out of gamescom or even the Tokyo Game Show (which has still about a 1/3 more coverage than the PGW) despite the fact that the event happens on the other side of the world and the media that we track are Western media. But for its first edition, backed by a major media event, this is an outstanding performance.

Sony events

With the Paris Games Week behind us now, we have a great opportunity to look into the effect the event had on Sony’s game console media presence in comparison to its other recent media events.

To focus on the media dedicating time to the Sony conference, I limited the sample to 3 days – the day of the conference and the following 2 days. Longer period give more weight to the media initiatives on the show floor, or other unrelated announcements. Also bear in mind that articles only related to the console, but not the specifically about the event, are also counted.

The result was surprising to me. While Paris Game Week was the event this year that had the least coverage, it came surprisingly close to the Tokyo Game Show, but even more surprising, it had more media coverage than its direct European predecessor, the Sony media conference at gamescom last year.

Sony obviously did a great job in its media outreach around the event as well as efficiently managing the invites to the event itself. There is probably a positive effect from the company being on its own at the event, with no particular major announcement from its console competitors at the same time. An effect that Microsoft benefited from this year at gamescom as we saw earlier.

In many ways, this validates Sony’s decision to feature its media conference during the Paris Games Week. As each event is unique in many ways, the value of certain announcements not being equal, it is impossible to say if the number would have been better at gamescom, but the fact that they look so good, even compared to the closer Tokyo Game Show, is a feat in itself. It looks like a small repeat of last year’s brilliant Playstation Experience.

Talking of which, it will be the next milestone in this series on the impact of events on the media coverage.

The PGW’s paradox

Running concurrently with Paris Games Week is Game Connection – a special networking event where industry professionals can make appointments to meet. Last week, I also attended the Game Connection side of the event, and on multiple occasions I discussed with the people I was meeting the overall presence of the media (including a few journalists) at PGW.

There was a clear lack of international journalists at the Paris Games Week itself. It appears that many media flew over for the Sony conference and left right after it. In a few discussions, it seemed like they were not aware of the fact that they could attend PGW as well, nor that they could easily get newsworthy content from the exhibitors. And to be honest, they were not totally wrong. In many ways, the event is not structured to include media. The Game Connection, which is the only B2B space at the location, isn’t historically structured to host journalists. They have made specific efforts to be more inclusive of media, but we are far from the gamescom equivalent of the B2B area which hosts business meetings as well as media meetings in a dedicated environment.

But even the showfloor, which at gamescom is used for many media meetings and hands-on experiences, wasn’t set-up with media in mind. The space was almost always totally open, with very few meetings rooms there, and from what I could see, no booth had an identified location to find staff for a professional enquiry. Add to this the fact (reported to me, being fluent in French, it didn’t come to mind to actually check on this the couple of times I went to the showfloor) that the hosting staff were not selected with their capacity to communicate in English in mind. As a result you have a very consumer driven event, not very welcoming for the few international media that were present.

Local media were there though, and with a strong presence, but that doesn’t answer my questions in regards to what I call the PGW’s Paradox:

The PGW has stated its international ambitions many times. This is taken from their October press release:

International scope

The first Paris Games Week was held 5 years ago. This event tailored for all gamers has quickly and firmly established itself in the world’s top 5 video gaming fairs. Today, Paris Games Week is one of the world’s essential gaming industry events, for gamers as much as for professionals. The 2015 edition will host international speakers and exclusive releases, brand new to Paris Games Week. Members of SELL, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, are delighted to see the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre become home to everyone involved in video gaming, a place where the industry comes together to discover the new products that will be the stars of the end-of-year season.

While the Game Connection is very international, the PGW showfloor wasn’t. And its management of media lacked significantly in providing a strong basis for coverage outside of France.

This is by no means an easy fit. You would need a number of publishers and studios to play along, to provide multiple key beats during the event to attract international media, and the date of the event doesn’t make this very easy as October/November is usually more about the seasonal blockbusters and AAA-titles than new, upcoming announcements. But, if there was a perfect opportunity to do this, it was this year, and if there was one organisation in France able to coordinate this, it would the SELL, the PGW’s organizer, a trade body representing the videogame publishers.

There is a missed opportunity there, and depending on what Sony does next year in regards to its European media conference, this might have been a unique chance. With gamescom later in August, Sony might move back the conference there and depending on how happy they are of the Paris conference and how they want to situate the important announcements compared the competition. It is interesting to note that nothing prevents Microsoft to look into making its own announcements during PGW next year. However, I doubt the two companies will share their thoughts on what they will do…

Paris Games Week – picture @icotom

Note – you can find out more on the methodology on the dedicated blog post.

November 2, 2015/0 Comments/by Thomas BIDAUX

PR Intelligence

PR Intelligence – Video game events

While I had some requests to look into the Tokyo Game Show the way we looked into gamescom or E3, I thought that with the event being at a different scale (on this side of the world, the tool doesn’t track very well coverage from Asian media and they are just excluded from the data on these posts) it could be the opportunity to look at the coverage of different game events instead of an in-depth look at just TGS.

The usual disclaimers from the articles on the media monitor apply, but on top of this, I need to remind everyone that we can’t currently properly track E3 specifically in the media coverage (hence the slightly different methodology applied in the E3 coverage article).

Methodology for events – the Key 20 days

When looking at the way events are covered in the media, there was an interesting pattern on the timing of the coverage. There is some media attention as the event is getting closer and the hype is ramping up. You have rumours of the reveals you can expect, announcements about what to expect on site, this sort of things. Events also happen with very different timing in terms of the week of the day they happen. Business events will take place during the work week, consumer events will usually continue during the weekend. Then, you have such a density of information being thrown at the audience that you also see a good amount of coverage happening the week following the events when some interviews that couldn’t be put formatted properly during the event itself, or some change encounter that could only probably followed up on afterwards, can finally be published.

To cover all those aspects, and looking at patterns of media coverage across different events, I decided on a formula that seemed to apply fairly for all events. Taking on the first day of the event, I take the media coverage of the 9 days preceding the event, and the 11 days from the day the event start. I called them the Key 20 days, for lack of a better terminology.

As you will see, I also consider the media coverage on a daily basis, but this formula gives me a component to compare the events with each other.

Tokyo Game Show

This year’s Tokyo Game Show had a Sony press conference ahead of the show. And comparing the media coverage of this year with the coverage of last year, there is a very interesting effect that immediately noticeable.

The total amount of media coverage is not massively different from last year. But a lot of the media coverage shifted to a few days earlier, coinciding with the Sony conference.

It seems that the Sony conference had no effect but to displace when the media coverage happened. To be fair, over the key 20 days, there has been a marginal growth year-on-year, but nothing incredibly significant.

There are two possibilities:

The Sony conference has just shifted when the media coverage is happening and there wasn’t an impact on the volume of coverage.
The general coverage of the event decreased, and the Sony conference is hiding that decrease of media coverage.

I would tend to align with the second option, if only because the Sony Conference happened at a much more convenient time (during the work week). Of course, it shifted a lot of the Sony specific media coverage earlier, but I would have expected to see a more significant growth due to the more friendly timing. This hidden decrease could possibly be related to a weaker lineup of titles at the show this year compared to 2014.

This is just a theory though – at the end of the day TGS this year still had more media presence and any growth is a good sign for them.

Video Game Events scales

Events around video games seems to be multiplying every year, be they business events or consumer events. More and more local events are organised, conferences multiply as the industry diversifies.

In a marketing budget, events can represent very significant investments And not just because of the actual cash cost, but also in terms of the human resources that need to be allocated for it, and the disruption they can have on the development of games in order to have playable builds for them.

Getting a sense of the ROI for events is incredibly difficult – and while media coverage is one element to look at, it is definitely not the only measure to take into account. Still, this is the tool I have at my disposal, and one that can provide some interesting frame for references.

To clarify this graph, both PAXes in there are the PAX Prime event in Seattle, the largest of the PAX event. PGW is the Paris Games week and I didn’t put the 2015 numbers because the event hasn’t happened yet (it’s at the end of October). I will post the 2015 numbers on Twitter and might do a follow up of this article on it.

The reason the PGW was included, despite being a pretty “small” event from a media coverage point of view is because Sony will do an international press conference ahead of the event. It was presented as the replacement for its gamescom conference that didn’t happen this year (leaving Microsoft alone to take the lead on the event media coverage).

What is very revealing with this graph, is the difference in the magnitude of each event for media coverage. Keeping in mind that the tools we use don’t properly cover Asian media, the TGS is a significantly smaller event compared to gamescom, and it makes sense in that regard. What is more impressive is the difference in scale between those 2 events and PAX Prime.

PAX Prime is a consumer first event, but it saw more and more announcements being made there the years. Cliff Bleszinsky’s upcoming LawBreakers used that event for its first reveal for instance (and to great effect IMHO). There is an impressive discrepancy in the media impact between the premiere shows, with established brands (and strong support from the largest actors) and the rest. While I expected a big difference, this is bigger than I would have expected.

If E3 was in the graph, it would dwarf gamescom, and everything else would look even more ridiculously smaller. If anything, I feel this shows there is probably too much concentration at the moment in terms of the media coverage of events. It will be incredibly interesting to see if the PGW can show the impact of the Sony conference move for the event coverage – it could prove that spreading the communication across more events is a worthy strategy, the way they brilliantly orchestrated the Playstation Experience last year.

Summer 2015 events

With gamescom, PAX and TGS within 2 months of the summer, I thought I could show how they get covered in that period.

It is important to remember that gamescom was unusually early this year. It will be back to the 2nd of August next year, and closer to PAX Prime again.

In the graph, the fact that PAX Prime runs over a weekend is quite apparent. Where gamescom and TGS both peak around the large conferences and the first days, PAX main day is on the Monday (and the last day of the event).

I also went and looked at the media languages of those 3 events:

The first graph is looking at the total number if articles in each languages. The second graph at the number of unique websites in each languages.

For all languages, both in volume of articles and number of unique media, the gamescom is the largest event. It is a lot larger for Germany though, unsurprisingly as the event is hosted there, and a lot more local media is likely to pick up on related news.

It is interesting to note though, that there are more English media covering PAX Prime and the TGS (again, PAX being in the US, they benefit from the locality), but more articles are written in English about TGS. It shows they are just more news announced there (which is also logical considering the events profiles). However, the fact that about the same number of German media are covering PAX as TGS is more unexpected. I suspect the stronger PC profile of German media makes a larger proportion of outlets interested in PAX news, than say French media (about half of the number of websites covering TGS covered PAX). Looking at number of articles in French for the TGS compared to PAX Prime also shows a strong interest in the Japanese event compared to the other languages (and France love history with the Japanese culture could be at play here).

A few more thoughts

Large events are very unique beasts, they concentrate a lot of the communication happening in the game industry. But looking at the data for the smaller events, it is clear they are growing in terms of their media coverage too. They can play a very interesting role for companies that cannot compete with the large budgets the big shows are commanding. I will keep a close eye on those data and likely do a follow up, with a focus on events outside of the “blockbusters” of each continent (E3, gamescom, TGS).

October 7, 2015/1 Comment/by Thomas BIDAUX