The Bordeaux Geek Festival: from the playful to a growing market

From 25 to 28 May 2017, the third edition of the Bordeaux Geek Festival took place at the Bordeaux Exhibition Park. This year’s event attracted nearly 28,000 visitors (even more than in previous years) which is a very good record and thus reflects the rise of geek culture within our society.

On the festival programme; fancy dress contests, concerts, conferences, games, body painting, meetings with prestigious guests not to mention the 40th anniversary of Starwars on May 25th.

During the four days of the Bordeaux Geek Festival, visitors were able to immerse themselves in the world of pop culture mixing video games, comics, science fiction, high tech…

The BGF also offered e-sports tournaments with more than 7000 cashprizes on licenses such as League Of Legends, Hearthstone, Counter Strike with more this year’s Overwatch; Blizzard’s fps was indeed part of the game, it celebrated its first candle on May 24 (the day before the launch of the event) and already has more than 30 million players!

Although there was the participation of professional teams last year, the tournaments were open to everyone! This is enough to democratize e-sports and make it part of the technophile landscape of everyday life.

This type of event underlines the rise of the e-sports phenomenon in France, certainly if we take the example of League Of Legends and the 2400 cashprize of the BGF, we are far from the millions of dollars of cashprize allocated to an official championship.

Nevertheless, this proves that e-sports is taking hold in a serious way and for those who are still dubious about the expansion of the discipline, it is enough to open its internet browser and go to twitch.tv to discover the substantial number of viewers as real that look professional and/or amateur players.

If we take the example of Leagues Of Legends, the most watched game on the platform, it alone reaches several hundred thousand “viewers”, even better, when it is a Korean champion who broadcasts his games live, he can capture an audience approaching 200,000 people alone.

In addition, when we look at the numbers of a world championship, we see that the magnitude is growing year by year, 43 million people watched at least a few minutes of the final of the last League Of Legends World Championships in 2016 (36 million in 2015 and 27 million in 2014).
These figures must make companies react to the new communication and marketing opportunities offered by the world of gaming and its dissemination, especially when we know that some gamers are real influencers with growing communities.

Patrick BONTE – BORDEAUX Business

Sources:

Bordeaux Geek Festival

The Team

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