Thanks to Justin Giza for his input and help with this article.
With CES behind us many of us in the media have begun to plan for upcoming shows later in the summer such as E3, Gamescom, and PAX Prime for gaming. Of course San Diego Comic Con, D23 Expo, and The Star Wars Celebration will also play a big part in the coverage plans we have a very full convention schedule in 2015. The above list is only a partial one and does not cover local conventions and other conventions that we will have staff covering ranging from Cinemacon, GDC, Creation, and other shows.
One new show for us this year is PAX South which is set to take place this weekend in San Antonio. This is the third domestic PAX Show and the 4th overall and offers us the first gaming conference of the year.
It appears that several of the majors will be sitting out this show, and that the focus will be on smaller independent developers and publishers. This is not exactly a big shock as PAX Prime had a large indie presence amongst the big companies and some publishers may take a wait and see approach to get an idea how the first year show is attended. PAX East for example is an established event yet Sony and a few other big names were absent from last year’s show as an example.
While we are usually flooded with more meeting requests than we know what to do with, PAX South has been much lighter and to date Gearbox is the biggest name developer that we have heard from.
This is not to say that larger developers will not be present as they may be there and simply keeping a lower profile and not booking as many meetings as they have nothing new to reveal at this time.
Many of the big announcements and first looks will come this June at E3 but for now we would not expect to have any big news drop at the show.
Gearbox will be showing off the remastered Homeworld collection but it would be nice if they would shed some light on new Borderlands or Duke Nukem games but I think that if any news is coming for either of the franchises, it is too early in the year for it to drop.
It will be interesting to see what shines at the show as without as many big boys, the smaller developers will have more attention upon them, and I am looking forward to seeing what shines with the spotlight firmly upon them.
