ESports Branding Summit on soon
THOSE who couldn’t make it into the Olympics or the Paralympics still have a chance of living out their sporting dreams, with the launch of Africa’s first eSports Branding Summit at the rAge Expo next weekend.
The 7th GAMeS (Global Assembly Marketing eSports), in partnership with rAge, will kick off the halfday event, where they will explore the opportunities eSports presents to South African business and how it can “capitalise on the eSports phenomenon, which is taking millennial audiences by storm across the globe”.
Mlondi Mashinini, GAMeS summit programme director, said: “While millions of gamers across the country buy games every month and fill up local servers every night competing against their online adversaries, for the most part, they have remained a market segment which is largely not identified or targeted by South African business.”
Mashinini explained that eSports research from SuperData showed that the total worldwide market for eSports will reach $910 million (R12.4 billion) in 2016 and that 334 million people watched the 2015 League of Legends World Championships.
“Despite these impressive figures, for many, eSports remains the biggest thing most people have never heard of.
“The goal of the summit will be to unpack the trends that are happening internationally as well as locally and expand brands’ horizons around the potential of eSports in an African context,” Mashinini said.
The rAge expo seems like the perfect place for the summit because of its place as the country’s premier gaming event.
Michael James, senior project manager at the expo, said more than 33 000 people attended rAge last year. “Our intention, since the inception of the expo, was to broaden the gaming community,” he added.