GamerCon finalising plans for London event

Games conference company GamerCon holds its first event in Ireland next March, and already the organisers are finalising plans for a London event.

The event, which recently signed up GameStop as a sponsor, is intended to be a Europe-wide initiative, founder Ferdi Roberts said. Negotiations on the London venue are in their final stages, and the company is expected to announce details within weeks.

The Dublin event is scheduled to take place on March 18th and 19th, and is targeting 20,000 visitors over the course of the two days. Among the attractions are sneak peeks and previews of upcoming games, talks from YouTube games stars such as Uberdanger and JeromoseASF, and merchandise opportunities. The conference will also showcase technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality.

The idea for the event came from SaaS Markets founder Mr Roberts’ stint in Silicon Valley. While based in the US, he would often attend games events in San Jose, and when he returned to Ireland two years ago, he realised there was very little for games fans here that was on the same scale.

“I was looking at ventures to get myself into,” he said. “The gaming convention was an obvious for me.” The games convention market here was underinvested and underserved, he said, given the size of the audience in Ireland.

“We want to try to bring something that gives the gaming public in Ireland a large scale social connection, and also expose the great things that we’re doing in the gaming scene,” he said.

Mr Roberts said early response to the Irish event had been “phenomenal”, with about a quarter of tickets sold before the sponsor had been announced.