Page 34 - AdNews May-June 2020

Investigation
LEFT: Lance Traore
BELOW: PAX Australia 2019
OPPOSITE PAGE: Melbourne Esports Open 2019
Tapping into the growing market locally, former Village Roadshow chief digital officer Jon Satterley and tech entrepreneur Adrian Giles have launched what they’re claiming is the “largest video gaming and esports entertainment venue in the Southern Hemisphere”. Called Fortress Melbourne, the precinct is located in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD and already has Dell’s Alienware on board as its technology partner, and Carlton & United Breweries on board as a supporter.
On its opening day, the venue pulled in 2,000 people, with the busi- ness aiming to get 25,000-30,000 unique visitors in a month.
“We figured there was a couple of things missing in the ecosystem for gaming,” Satterley, CEO and co-founder of Fortress, tells AdNews.
“Video games are mostly single-player at home, and we felt there was a unique opportunity to create a live and social gaming experience that hadn’t been done before.”
Satterley says that gaming consumption is as mature in Australia as it is in any other part of the world, but that it’s gaming “culture” that is considered niche.
“The difference between Australia and say China or Korea, is that games, games culture in Australia is still considered a niche or non-main- stream thing.
“Whereas if you’re in China or Korea, you quickly realise that gaming culture is 100% mainstream, it’s infiltrated the whole psyche and main- stream conversations.
“In Australia that’s not the case, games culture and gaming hasn’t really permeated to that degree. While that may be true around how the perception of games is in the media and society in Australia, it doesn’t mean that the actual playing of games and what’s going on isn’t hugely popular, it’s just that the media hasn’t caught up.”
Fortress offers a mix of partnerships and sponsorships, which the team has been educating the market on to avoid brands “slapping” a logo on a wall in their venue.
“We’ve done a lot of work around what partnerships and sponsorships look like,” Satterley says.
One industry that has seen the oncoming rise in gaming and esports is luxury fashion. Brands such as Louis Vuitton are sponsoring esports events and releasing clothing that taps into gaming culture. This inter- est from high-end fashion isn’t a reflection of the demographic of gamers, but rather an indication of their culture impact.
“It’s interesting what they’re [fashion labels] doing with gaming now,” Traore says.
“Louis Vuitton hasn’t looked at the audience of League of Legends and thought ‘hey, there’s great affin- ity of people buying handbags worth $2,000 that play League of Legends’.
“Instead, they’ve identified that gaming is now slowly becom- ing the dominant force that inspires all of pop culture. This is something that they’ve [luxury fashion brands] done before.
“If you walked into their stores 15, 20 years ago, you wouldn’t see a single sneaker in there. But now all of them do sneakers and streetwear collabo- rations because they saw about 10 years ago that hip-hop went from being underground to slowly entering into popular culture. Now street cul- ture is the dominant force across everything, and this is similar to what they’re seeing with gaming.”
The strong following behind gaming and esports means that audiences crave real-life events, much like experiential has boomed across other categories.