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Preview: Festival of Games 2011

Feb 09 2011 12:00 AM | Events For Gamers in Festival of Games

Preparations for one of Europe's first big games events, the Festival of Games - taking place on April 28-29 in Utrecht, The Netherlands - are well underway, with a raft of top-level speakers already announced and more to follow.

Here, chairman of the event, Seth van der Meer explains the theme of Games Anywhere, and why the Festival of Games this year could be among the most incisive on the calendar.

Quote

Q: What are the ambitions behind Festival of Games?

Seth van der Meer: Well, the whole plan when we started was to strengthen the Dutch games development market, and actually with the growth of the industry we discovered that Europe has its own agenda - it's much more focused on the creation of original IP and a bit less on publishing.

That's been changing over the last couple of years, away from the developer-publisher-retailer model to the digital distribution era, and we've seen some interesting European companies spring up, like SPIL Games, Bigpoint and Gameforge.

On the wave of those new developments we thought it would be interesting to have a festival that would align and present those developments in this area in Europe. That's what we've been trying to do in the last couple of years - programme an event that has its own European agenda; that shows the way the games industry is developing over here, in contrast to what's going on in other parts of the world.

Read the rest of the interview at GamesIndustry.biz!