For the first time this year, the Entertainment Software Association opened the doors to its popular E3 conference to the general public, and the group says the experiment was a success.

E3 is where many video games for the upcoming year make their debut. The event had been open only to industry professionals and media in the past, but ESA announced in February it would sell 15,000 tickets to the general public for this year's show, held from June 12-14 in Los Angeles.

In a statement issued on the final day of the event, ESA CEO Mike Gallagher said E3 "blew past expectations" with 68,400 attendees. Millions more participated online by watching footage from the show.

"E3 2017 was a huge success. The advancements in technology unveiled at E3 will redefine and drive worldwide growth of the most meaningful form of entertainment on the planet," Gallagher said.

The decision to open E3 to the public was viewed by many video game industry observers as a move in response to two trends. The first is the growing popularity of video game conventions already open to the public. The second is video game companies' use of online video personalities to market their products, giving them a means to generate word-of-mouth without turning to events like E3.

The latter trend may be why Gallagher stressed the amount of social media attention E3 generated for companies that participated in the event. The show generated 15 million E3-related posts across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, he said. In addition, tens of millions of people watched more than 5.5 million hours of E3 content on Twitch, a popular streaming video platform for gamers. http://prn.to/2rz3kIW

Not everyone was impressed. The video game site Polygon reported the organizers had to open the doors to the event 15 minutes early on its first day because of overflowing crowds. Holly Green, a reviewer for news site Paste, noted that to make room for the 15,000 public attendees, ESA scaled back the number of tickets available to industry professionals and journalists.

"If the ESA wishes to maintain the professional relevancy of E3, they need to scale back the public attendance (reduce available general admission tickets) so that the people who have a job to do can, ahem, do their job," Green wrote. http://bit.ly/2tvhEPo

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