Hey! I'm sure some of you are still watching the content from this year, but given that it was my first year booking, I wanted to pop in and solicit some feedback from everyone. If you want to express that as "I liked this person, I didn't like this person" please be respectful or sent me a private message -- even when a guest doesn't necessarily fit into our mix, we need to be respectful of their time and presence. I've learned a bunch of lessons that I'll probably write down in a big blog post on Monday or Tuesday (I'm taking Monday off to try and catch up on sleep).
I think you should try to have less guests on at one time, and maybe fewer GB members as well. Something like 4-5 people total per session might allow everyone to get more words in, rather than 2-3 people being almost silent most of the time. Maybe like 2 GB members and 2 guests.
Also, just make note of which guests your audience in general enjoyed, or which guests you found to be the most talkative/interesting, as well as which guests were disliked or didn't add much to the discussion. I'm sure it's tough to make these calls, but I think you need to filter the good guests out and be more selective with your invites next time. Of course since this was your first time doing this you didn't have as good an idea of how guests would interact during this type of show, but now since one E3's in the bag you can take a step back and give it a closer look.
I think it's important to consider guest synergy. For instance, it seems awkward sometimes when you have a mix of journalists and developers on at one time, because some of the devs are mainly at E3 to talk about their game/developer experience, while the journalists are focused on all games. So in these cases it seems like the discussion can go places where certain guests have little to say, or lack knowledge in an area to join in. So my recommendation would be to try to have some sessions with only developer guests and GB staff, and other sessions with journalist guests and GB staff. That way the topics and discussion will be more relevant to everyone at the table, and everyone would be able to provide input. Further, I think when you're going to have guests that are very close to GB like Drake/Pope/John V/Lang, you might want to consider just having them on during certain sessions, rather than mixing them with other less close knit guests. Because the inside jokes/tomfoolery that erupts during those segments seems to catch other newer guests off guard a bit, making it more difficult for them to speak up.
And to be a little more nitpicky, I personally preferred the couch/casual atmosphere of previous years more than the long table set up of this year.
That being said, I enjoyed the discussions this year for the most part, and I hope to see more content like this spring up in the future! Shoutouts to Jeff Green and Jeff Cannata who I hope are brought back on in future shows.
