[shuzchen]

I'm an armchair theorist on this topic, but I suspect you get more benefit with an event booth, especially if the people that attend the event have already been self-selected into your target demographic. There's just so much more room for engagement in person, as you can answer questions, provide clarification on the spot, and even obtain advice (perhaps some passerby has a cool idea they want to see in your game). This is drastically harder to do with a website.

This is even more important for smaller indie teams where the developers are the ones manning the booths. I'd be way more interested in discussing the product if I knew I were talking to one of the developers. I found this reflected in my behavior at the vendor booths at pycon this year. When a booth was manned by salespeople, I'd just go take their free shirt and if I was interested in the product I'd only ask a few brief questions and leave with a brochure. When the booth was manned by the founders and three-quarters of the dev team, I was more apt to discuss further, asking about their software stack, or their thoughts on competing products, or the future roadmap of the product. This type of perspective a salesperson doesn't have and usually can't officially speak about.