The Gamelab video game fair will be held from June 28 to 30 in the MediaTIC building, in the heart of Poblenou, a neighborhood that is home to a large part of the companies in the sector.
“We have never left Barcelona, ??so we are not going back either”, clarifies its founder, Iván Fernández Lobo. “The pandemic caused a forced stoppage in the activity, we rested a couple of years from the event. In that impasse, the DeviCAT employers’ association was strengthened, one of the strongest in Europe”.
Gamelab will host more than 100 European industry leaders (professionals, entrepreneurs and investors), as well as 150 companies and organizations -including FunPlus, SocialPoint, Amber, IO Interactive, Take2 studio, Parallel and Coherence-, in a total of 67 conferences. For Lobo, “it is about strengthening business relations and acting as a pole of attraction for talent, investors and projects”.
Lobo defines the video game as “the most influential medium of our time.” The sector invoices some 200,000 million euros in the world and, in Catalonia, employs 5,000 professionals and invoices more than 500 million, “which are many more due to the impact on other products and sectors”, clarifies Lobo. The Catalan video game industry invoices 50% of the state total, according to the Report on the audiovisual sector in Catalonia 2022, presented yesterday by the vice president of the Consell de l’Audiovisual de Catalunya (CAC), Rosa Maria Molló. This year, in addition to the MediaTIC building, there will be events at the Palau de la Música (institutional and investment meetings) and at the Barcelona Tech City building (local entrepreneurial communities).
Gamelab started in Asturias and, in 2011, moved to Catalonia “to build that shared dream that we claim in this year’s slogan, which is that Barcelona is the ideal place to settle, the Silicon Valley of the sector in Europe”.
Among the many events that Gamelab has been organizing in other places, there is a meeting in Tenerife at the end of last year that brought together 60 European leaders in the sector and that has paved the way for a first meeting to be held by the European presidency on the subject in the same city.
Gamelab is supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona City Council and the Spanish Government. Gamelab itself and DeviCAT are in charge of organizing it, with the collaboration of the Spanish Association of Video Game Developers (DEV).
