EA on London Games Festival

Is London Games Festival definitely returning this year? When is it and what will it consist of?

Yes it is; the Festival will run throughout October. The LGF is to make London a focus for Interactive Entertainment and to engage with media, consumers and Government.

The London Games Festival is made up of individual events led by seperate companies all brought together under the LGF umbrella.

ELSPA will coordinate the full festival as well as organise the ELSPA-specific events to be determined. There will be Festival PR led by ELSPA but each event’s PR will be down to the organising participant.

How can the industry make the most of LGF? Is this just for publishers, or can retail play a part too?

The LGF is an open format allowing stakeholders and participants to hold shared or autonomous events as they deem appropriate. We also encourage people to run bespoke events of course.

However if a participant already has planned activities then we just ask that they be held under the LGF banner. This could well mean that no additional investment would be needed as the activities a participant organises may already be budgeted and planned for.

What needs to happen for LGF to grow in profile in 2010, after a very quiet festival last year?

We need more participants. We already have events that are confirmed and it is an open forum for any organisation to take part in. The more participants, the more we show ourselves as a truly significant and successful industry – and everyone will benefit from the accumulation of all the media attention. The more there is for consumers and the Government to see and take part in, the more successful an image we will be and the amplification of noise will be louder.

ELSPA will take ownership of the LGF and provide organisational and PR support. ELSPA will facilitate the calendar of events and activities and will be pro-active to the trade and stakeholders to fill the calendar. ELSPA will work as hard as possible to garner support from as many participants as possible.

Who is leading the LGF project this year?

This year we are lucky to have secured Kirsty Payne who will manage the event. Anyone looking to take part or find out more should contact Kirsty at kirsty.payne@londongamesfestival.co.uk or kirsty.payne@elspa.com or contact +44 (0) 207 534 0580.

In addition to Kirsty, we will have a retained Mainstream PR Agency and much of the comms and marketing initiatives will be formed as an output of a forum of lead marketing ad PR experts from the Industry.

What do you want the event to achieve?

There are three key desired outcomes from this year’s London Games Festival:

* Engagement of mainstream and dedicated media in a co-ordinated and centrally-led London Games Festival.
* Engagement of consumers in interactive entertainment events for four weeks in and around London.
* Engagement of Westminster – with a month-long focus on cultural and economic benefits of games and interactive entertainment as a whole.

Two key events, Eurogamer Expo and London Games Conference, took place during LGF last year, but both have moved to either ends of the month – will they be part of LGF this year? Or is LGF more about marketing and PR this year than live events as such?

The LGF isn’t bound by dates and both the events you mentioned will be taking place under the LGF banner. We have flexibility.

At the end of the day this is about making a collective noise about this wonderful industry to the key audiences mentioned above. We all believe that this is where the ‘whole will be greater than the sum of the parts’.

Kirsty will be looking to make contact with as many players in the industry as humanly possible and I ask everyone who reads this to make themselves or an appointed person available.