ELSPA to launch new London games festival

UK publisher trade body ELSPA has announced the launch of London Interactive - a week-long games festival supported by a number of key agencies including the Mayor, the DTI and the Visit London tourist board.

The festival will run from August 30 to September 5 next year - roughly the same week as CMP's London Games Week, which was launched as a general banner for events including ECTS and GDCE this year.

ELSPA's event will be focused on the ExCeL conference centre in London's Docklands, and will feature the previously announced European Games Network trade event and the Game Stars Live event.

Both the Mayor's office and Visit London appear to be on board for the event, with Mayor Ken Livingstone commenting that "a London-wide festival of gaming could offer an excellent means to promote computer and video gaming to investors as well as the public and to underpin the capital's role as a centre for gaming."

From a business perspective what's more interesting is the support of the Department of Trade and Industry, which has been becoming increasingly involved in the games industry in recent years and ran the successful UK Pavilion at E3 in Los Angeles last May. The DTI is expected to arrange a series of inwards missions for overseas trade delegations to visit London during the London Interactive week.

So where does this leave CMP's long-running ECTS event, and the London Games Week initiative which houses it? It's hard to say at this point what the real effect will be, but it's clear that this move will be divisive and may well detract from both events. CMP's events will still run in the far better-positioned Earls Court venue, the organisers having learned their lesson when a move to the remote and poorly-serviced ExCeL centre a few years back resulted in a show which might charitably be described as a wash-out.

The successful GDCE event will remain in the CMP fold, naturally, and Sony may well choose to stick with CMP for the hugely popular PlayStation Experience consumer event simply on the basis of the better venue Earls Court provides. Of course, since this is a consumer event it makes little difference which games festival it's ostensibly a part of, as long as it runs within the dates of both.

The real worry is the trade shows, CMP's ECTS and ELSPA's European Games Network. It's unlikely that companies will want to build a significant presence at both shows - meaning that either one show is going to have to bow out of the running before next August, or visitors will be faced with the nightmare situation of having to cross London in order to catch all of the industry's key companies.

It doesn't look like the two companies are likely to reach an amicable settlement that benefits trade visitors any time soon, either, if the vicious comments carried in today's issue of UK trade magazine MCV are anything to go on.

ELSPA director general Roger Bennett accuses CMP's London Games Week of "failing to live up to its billing", describing it as "a coagulation of activity which was incestuous and made up of parts that would have existed regardless of London Games Week," while CMP's Andy Lane stated that the London Interactive initiative "would be laughable if it wasnât so distasteful," and accused ELSPA of "piracy" of CMP's ideas.