Last year at E for All, we called attention to the distinct lack of attendance on the part of both the exhibitors and the public. The event took place in the cavernous South Hall of the Los Angeles Convention Center, which during the glory days of E3, the event this one is supposed to be “replacing”,  was standing room only. E3 also inhabited the other two colossal halls at this venue, and if you were able to see the extent of a single hall in one day you had something to be proud of. Last year E for All took up about half of the floor space in the South Hall, Nintendo was by far the most popular booth at the event, and pop culture smash-hits like Rockband and Guitar Hero were the most prominent games on display. This year, the event has moved to the miniscule-by-comparison West Hall, and still does not come close to optimizing the available real estate.

The big names from last year are very noticeably missing. Nintendo was a no show this year. So was HP/Voodoo. Intel brought a massive exhibit to the event again this year, showing their extreme devotion to the gaming cause. Problem is, most of the attendees of this event are console gamers, over which Intel has no meaning. As a result, the Intel booth was pretty vacant most of the time, save for the sizable annex being used by the Extreme Masters CS 1.6 and WoW tournaments. The WCG tournament area was relatively busy; probably because it had tons of stuff to give away and a ridiculously humongous stage to occupy.

The EA booth, which at the last real E3 was a towering circle of graphical and aural bliss, resembled my front yard; a big green carpet with several gaming consoles sprouting up intermittently, and pretty much nothing else. Certainly not people. Aside from the always sparsely populated “Into the Pixel” art exhibit (which, ironically, is probably the most important thing the show has to offer in terms of shining a favorable light upon a hobby that has attracted rather unsavory criticism in recent years), EA was definitely the biggest ghost town in the building, despite it being located right in front of the entrance.

It all begs the question: Where is everyone? I have to believe attendance was disappointing this year, provided it wasn’t projected based on what I definitely consider to be abysmal numbers last year. The show is relatively accessible in one of the biggest markets in the world (Greater Los Angeles), is pretty inexpensive to attend (or exhibit at) when compared to similar events, and has the added advantage of being considered the “successor of E3″. Sure those are big shoes to fill, but scaling down the gaudiness of E3 slightly while keeping the same vendors signing up should still draw untold thousands from the world over. Instead, E for All has once again shown that it is hardly more than a shell of its former self.

That said, what lures us to these events is still alive and well at E for All: smaller companies releasing exciting new products. TN Games, the creator of the 3rd Space Gaming Vest that we wrote about last year, was back with the finished product and attacted plenty of attention again this year. A French company called NOVA Gaming showed up with a radical new mouse design and a super-slick mousepad. Easily the coolest thing this year from a hardware standpoint was the ioXtreme storage device from a company called Fusion-io. To say the ioXtreme “rapes” would be a tragic understatement. We will get into significant more detail on this in a later article.

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