Barcelona has become one of the most important business hubs for the video game industry in Europe. This is the implicit leitmotiv in most of the conferences that were held yesterday at Gamelab Barcelona 2023. After three years without being held in person, the prestigious video game congress opened the doors of the MediatTIC building yesterday to bring together internationally and locally renowned personalities .
“In 2023 we have proposed a local event that can be transferred to a global event,” Iván Fernández Lobo, founder of the congress, told La Vanguardia. Yesterday’s conference program brought together historical names in the industry, such as Peter Molyneux or Sir Ian Livingstone. In the same way, personalities from the public administration and large national and international companies participated, such as Tencent, Ubisoft, Infinity Ward or IOI Barcelona. Among the topics that were discussed, there was one that permeated the different talks of the day: the qualification of Catalonia and, especially, Barcelona as the center of the European video game industry.
In the inaugural round table, the general director of Innovation and Digital Culture of the Generalitat, Marisol López, indicated that the sector is reaching a moment of balance, with a number of studies that are being established and consolidated. For Xavier Carrillo, founder of Digital Legends, a company acquired by the multinational Activision Blizzard, “Barcelona is much further away today 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.
Veteran video game developer Ian Livingstone assured that “Barcelona is doing very well”. Along the same lines, different speakers highlighted the creative talent in the city and the good relationship between the private and public sectors. Speakers such as David Gardner, co-founder of London VP, and Peter McCabe, director of production at Infinity Ward, also highlighted Barcelona’s style and quality of life as something to consider for a studio to function better.
“Gamelab is one of the most recognized Catalan video game brands in the world,” insists Fernández. The influx of the event, which combines conferences and networking sessions until Friday, has registered a total of 2,000 people, who sold out in just 24 hours.
Fernández points out that Gamelab has been able to strengthen the Catalan ecosystem thanks to the creation of a space for dialogue between the different agents in the sector: “Gamelab’s objective has always been to act as a beacon, a point of reference and inspiration, a place where meet and feel part of a common project”. According to the latest data from the white paper on Spanish video game development, the Spanish video game industry had a turnover of 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 the Administration. Fernández recalls how, in the first editions of Gamelab, foreign speakers capable of inspiring the attendees were sought, while today the opposite is the case: “The speakers no longer come to be inspiring, but to look for opportunities.”
