hearts of Insomnia’s ‘world famous’ Pub Quiz and the BYOC section, which together have been a mainstay and a bastion of old school PC exclusivity ever since the very beginning. “We are going to experiment and try some new things
out,” admits Fletcher. “Particularly, I wanted to expand the indie and trade side of the event. That’s things like expanding the Indie Zone, looking at running developer tracks, running careers workshops, a careers fair, etc. It’s expanding the scope as well as the size.” Fletcher likens Insomnia more to a platform than an
“Is it going to come back bigger than the last one?
Possibly not. But that’s not a problem, because effectively this first one’s a test. It’s a case of let’s get it done. We could do surveys and projections and hypothesise as much as we like, but nothing really tests things than just doing it. We’ll get a lot of information that will help us make the next one even better.” Insomnia 68 won’t be the first gaming get-together
organised by the newly independent Player1 Events. “We actually did an event, AWF (Afternoon With Friends), a sort of a B2B industry event back in November, which was a new thing that we launched. It had about 70-80 people, but it was really, really good. Everyone loved meeting up again and I think that gave us a lot of confidence that Insomnia was going to come back stronger and that people wanted it.”
MORE OF THE SAME For those who may have attended one of the more recent pre-COVID Insomnia events, Fletcher says to expect more of the same. “We didn’t really aim for different on the first one back,” he says. “We aim to run all the things that we are known for.” He lists esports tournaments (for Overwatch, Valorant, CS:GO and League of Legends), the Cosplay Zone and stage show, Retro Zone, a VR gaming stand, Tabletop Zone, the appearance of more than 60 content creators and influences, and the twin beating
50 | MCV/DEVELOP April 2022
event, something that can be added to and expanded as the need and opportunity arise: “The core of it is a community event, for a community of gamers, but on that platform you can bolt things on that people want to do. Like, for example, we’ve had League Fest there before, which is a separate hall just about League of Legends. We’ve had the Call of Duty World League finals in a separate hall. That’s the sort of thing we’re looking at doing and we’re having lots of conversations with people about how we bolt on additional content to the festival. As with Glastonbury you have your stages and an eclectic mix of everything in between. There’s no reason Insomnia can’t be like that.”
GO FORTH AND MULTIPLAY Since the last Insomnia in September 2019, there have of course been a couple of new consoles released. Player1 has bought a sizable number of each and will be showcasing recent and upcoming games in its NewGen Gaming Zone. Along with fifty RTX 3080-specced PCs, the new hardware acquisitions are part of the company’s wider strategy, which is to be able to offer rentals and compete for contract events, which was a successful pillar of Multiplay’s business before Game took it over. “We used to run Minecon. We used to run RuneFest.
We used to run a number of big, big scale conferences for people and we’re going to look into bringing that back, especially with our investment in lots of new kit.” Aside from trying to export Insomnia to other parts of
the world - specifically the US, Europe and Middle East - there are plans that Player1 Events are embarking on that aren’t cribbed from Multiplay’s old blueprint for world domination. One area, for example, that Fletcher and the team are pondering, is the form and function of hybrid events, and the type of online content that might in future support in-person events. “That’s a big piece of thinking going on at the moment”
he says, “How do you create meaningful content for people at home that either can’t or won’t go to a physical event? It was stuff we were looking at before [COVID]. I remember looking at it while I was still there [at Game],
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