Reserving 600 square feet of space on the show floor of E3 costs $30,000. That's $50 per square foot for the smallest offered space, and it doesn't include other necessary costs - fees for the E3 management company GES, union labor and various red tape - which can add up to $15,000. More still, these prices don't include actual booth construction, game-demo tech, man-hours or convention swag.

Semiformal Studios bought one of the 600 square foot spots to show off its game, Ensemble Online, at E3 this year, and the team ended up spending $100,000 in total. This was cheap - Semiformal could have easily spent $500,000, Director Ian Kinsey tells me.

After dealing with the finances of E3 firsthand, Kinsey and Semiformal saw why more indies were unable to show their games at the event - and they decided to help. Semiformal established Indies Crash E3, a fan-voted contest to allow 10 indies into E3, using passes Semiformal was granted as a show-floor developer. The developers would demo their games in the Semiformal booth, share in its marketing campaign and have access to the most concentrated batch of networking opportunities of the year.