Barcelona has become one of the most important business hubs of the video game industry in Europe. This is the implicit leitmotif in most of the conferences that could be heard yesterday at Gamelab Barcelona 2023. After three years without being held in person, the prestigious video games congress opened the doors of the MediatTIC building yesterday to bring together personalities of international and local renown.
“In 2023 we have proposed a local event that can be transferred to a global event”, comments Iván Fernández Lobo, founder of the congress, to La Vanguardia. Yesterday’s conference program brought together historical names in the industry such as Peter Molyneux and Sir Ian Livingstone. In the same way, personalities from the public administration and large national and international companies such as Tencent, Ubisoft, Infinity Ward and IOI Barcelona participated. Among the topics that were discussed, there was one that was extended to the different talks of the day: the qualification of Catalonia and, especially, Barcelona as the center of the European video game industry.
At the inaugural round table, the general director of Innovation and Digital Culture of the Generalitat, Marisol López, indicated that the sector is reaching a point of balance, with a number of studies being established and consolidated. According to Xavier Carrillo, founder of Digital Legends, a company acquired by the multinational Activision Blizzard, “Barcelona is today much further than I had imagined ten years ago”. “We are in a very sweet moment, now we need to take care of this ecosystem”, he added.
The veteran video game developer Ian Livingstone assured that “Barcelona is doing very well”. In the same vein, different speakers highlighted the creative talent in the city and the good relationship between the private sector and the public. Speakers such as David Gardner, co-founder of London VP, and Peter McCabe, production director at Infinity Ward, also highlighted the style and quality of life in Barcelona, ??which must be taken into account for a studio to work better.
“Gamelab is one of the most recognized Catalan video game brands in the world”, insists Fernández. The attendance at the event, which combines conferences and networking sessions until Friday, has recorded a total of 2,000 people, who sold out in just 24 hours.
Fernández emphasizes that Gamelab has been able to strengthen the Catalan ecosystem thanks to the creation of a space for dialogue between the different agents of the sector: “The objective of Gamelab has always been to act as a beacon, a point of reference and inspiration , a place to meet and feel part of a common project”. According to the latest data from the white paper on the development of Spanish video games, the Spanish video game industry invoiced 1,281 million euros in 2021, 52% of which in Catalonia.
Iván Fernández Lobo created Gamelab in 2003 in Asturias as a university video game incubator that two years later became an event. In 2019, the congress was located in Barcelona to create a meeting space for developers, companies, students and Administration. Fernández remembers that in the first editions of Gamelab, they looked for foreign speakers able to inspire the attendees, while today it’s the other way around: “Lecturers no longer come to be inspiring, but to look for opportunities”.
