Larian’s Swen Vincke Talks E3 Booth Costs

Larian Studios is apparently gearing up for an announcement of Project E at E3, although, judging by this blog post from Swen Vincke, the expenses for the booth were much bigger than anticipated, rocketing to roughly $45,000 in total. Here’s an excerpt:

But when the journalists come, we’ll probably have to give them something to remember us by. That seems to be the norm. So cost .

I guess I can stop now because I you probably get the general idea just covering the basics got me to 45KUS$, and that’s not counting the unforeseens.

To some in this industry, that’s peanuts, to others, that could be a significant portion of their development budget. To us, as developers, it represents money we could spend on getting an extra programmer or artist to help out with our overfull schedules.

So the natural question is is it really necessary ?

Because I’m the caveman, and couldn’t figure out the answer, I called our publishing guru, Sergei and asked him to explain to me again why we’re spending 45KUS$ on E3.

Without a hitch, he started lecturing me:

(Look, I just talked to a good friend of ours who is publishing a game of a good friend of ours which is being published now, and he just sent 560 copies to journalists, in Germany alone.

When we go to E3, we get in touch with hundreds of journalists that we don’t know and who we otherwise wouldn’t reach. Call them unidentified PR if you want.

Every day we’ll have back to back meetings with up to 6 journalists per session. Perhaps they are not from the most important magazines in the world, but it’s the only chance we have of showing them our game and telling them what our vision is.

We did the same thing at Gamescom. We showed the same presentation of the game to anybody who cared to stop by, and we didn’t even ask them from which publication they were, because we just want to get the word out. Remember how pleasantly surprised we were when it turned out that that young guy was in fact an incredibly influential writer ?)

Thanks RPGWatch.