ESA's iicon was a promising start, but needs more commitment and more candour | Opinion

The ESA's first event since the late, largely lamented E3 has been built with a very different objective. Rather than a brash, sprawling conference centre with consumers as the explicit audience and implicit attendees, iicon took place on one stage and a handful of meeting rooms in a new, sparsely-populated casino towards the bottom end of the Las Vegas strip. The audience could be counted – just about – in hundreds, rather than tens of thousands; the stage presentations were about strategy, government policy and brand partnerships. The attendee list was ruthlessly policed, the news value was negligible, the coffee was good: the only similarity to E3 was the timezone and the logo on the invite. Read more