What challenges did creating FORMAT present, and how did you address them? Building a games industry event and cultural movement like FORMAT has come with a lot of practical and societal challenges. Starting out, like with many building their business, we faced challenges of building cash flow to help us grow the brand and expand our capabilities. For the first two years, we didn’t charge for tickets or charge exhibitors for their places at the event, as we understood we needed to earn the trust of the gaming and development community. After two years we started to attract leading game
studios, brands and community leaders, which proved to me that now was the time to start to grow out our business capabilities and start earning enough financial income to grow our events even further.
“We are feeling a strong appetite for the return of our events, which is truly phenomenal to see as it’s enabled us to grow even bigger and give
more back to the games industry community.”
The other big challenge we faced was overcoming a lot
of traditional views our industry peers had about events. We were seen as completely unorthodox, mixing one of the most extroverted activities i.e. nightlife culture events with video game culture and we had a lot of pushback from more traditionalist voices within the industry. However, FORMAT pushed through and has shown
that we are a platform for all within the industry. We are community builders that enable developers to have a voice and are bringing a real sense of grassroots community back to industry events.
The pandemic must have been difficult, but how was it coming out of that? The pandemic, to put it simply, was devastating for the games industry events sector. A lot of events are still feeling the effects from it, however the isolation created a massive hunger for events again and FORMAT saw its biggest number of ticket sales in 2022, with more attendees than all the pre-pandemic year combined. We are feeling a strong appetite for the return of our events, which is truly phenomenal to see as it’s enabled
April/May 2023 MCV/DEVELOP | 41
us to grow even bigger and give more back to the games industry community.
What can we expect at the next FORMAT event that makes it different to previous ones? I’ve been eagerly awaiting a chance to spill the tea on this! With our enormous success in 2022, been enabled to expand our events and incorporate two brand new game-changing features to our event as a I can happily confirm that FORMAT will now take place over two evenings, with the launch and introduction of our brand new event RE: FORMAT – a VIP industry party that will take place the night before our main FORMAT: The Ultimate Gaming Social event. It’ll be exclusively for our exhibitors,
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