Today the ESA brings word of a new speaker to the event, the Texas governor Rick Perry will be at the show to lead a keynote address about the gaming development and publishing sector in the state as well as their continued support to the industry so that the growth will fuel their economy for the 21st century.

For many years E3 had been the pinnacle of gaming fandom, an event so large and so crazy it brought in people from all over the country and even the world to this giant experience, after 2005 and 2006 though, a lot of things started to shake up, with fines being dealt to the developers and publishers for noise and models wearing too little for the public eye (although E3 was set to be an event for those 18+ only) and a huge amount of money being used to generate swag for these thousands upon thousands of people coming. As a result the coming year was set to address these problems starting to come up in the show, that instead of being an almost public event, they scaled the show down, they took out the booth babes, the DJ's and the massive displays for the developers. Instead of working in the shadow of EA, a publisher could display equally to their floor space and it was supposed to make things fine.

In the end, the event suffered from spacing, having to roam Santa Monica for demo stations, conferences and then back to the central area was a bit much, on top of that the people selected to host many of the demo stations were lacking in experience, instead of being able to talk to a developer, a producer or someone with background in the game we had to face beta testers with a few weeks of experience that were invited to come to the show to stand next to the machine for only really the purpose of resetting it if it crashed on the person playing. The disconnect there was massive, one can only hope this unified show back at the LACC brings some of that together again as everyone will hopefully be under just one roof.

The present exhibitor list is shaping up with a few names not mentioned before:

• 1UP Network
• Akella
• Atari Inc.
• Bethesda Softworks
• Capcom USA Inc.
• Crave Entertainment
• Codemasters
• D3Publisher of America
• Deep Silver
• Disney Interactive Studios, Inc.
• Electronic Arts; Eidos Interactive
• Fox Interactive Media
• Indie Games
• Jagex, Ltd.
• Konami Digital Entertainment America
• LucasArts
• Majesco Entertainment Company
• Microsoft Corporation;
• Midway Games, Inc.
• MTV Games
• Namco Bandai Games America, Inc.
• Natsume, Inc.
• Nintendo of America Inc.
• Novint Technologies, Inc.
• Nyko Technologies
• Rebellion
• SEGA of America, Inc.
• Serious Games Initiative
• Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc.
• Sony Online Entertainment Inc.
• Southpeak Interactive
• Square Enix USA
• Take-Two Interactive
• Tecmo
• THQ Inc.
• Toshiba America Information Systems
• Ubisoft Entertainment Inc.
• Valve Software
• Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment Inc

Those in the 100 and 200 series spaces outside of space 137 will get 20'x20' spaces to host their products in, those in the 300+ though will roughly get a 10'x10' space to demo their products in, 20'x20' isn't a huge amount of space to demo your products in for 2008 - 2009 so one would hope that they really do have a space efficient design especially for those companies seated in the 10'x10' rooms. According to the ESA this list is still expanding and they expect to sell out the floorspace soon, if so then it means at least that they are on the path to regaining some faith from the gaming industry that they represent even with a few recent losses (Activision/Vivendi and LucasArts)

As things continue to pan out we'll have info and I'll be reporting daily from E3 2008 this year.