Jean-Claude Ghinozzi On The Past, Present & Future Of Paris Games Week

Last week saw the sixth outing of the Paris Games Week consumer show, inviting gamers from France, Belgium and beyond to come and sample some of the games both on the cusp of release as well as those still further away in the future. By all counts, it has been another huge success, with 307,000 visitors to the Paris expo Porte de Versailles, cementing its place as one of the largest consumer games shows in the world, second only to Gamescom.

Even the first edition of the show, held back in 2010, brought in 120,000 visitors, vindicating the decision to create the expo in the first place. As Jean-Claude Ghinozzi, President of SELL, the trade body behind Paris Games Week, explained, “The initial objective was that we wanted to have a customer first show to bring to the French gamers. We know that market has grown a lot and there is nearly 80% of the population playing games of which nearly 60% are regular players, not casual players. So six years ago it was already something big in France in terms of market size and we didn’t have anywhere to put our gamer first approach for the French public.”

PGW is one of a wave of similar shows which have sprung up around the globe, including Gamescom, PAX and the UK’s EGX, which seemed to spring up and capitalise upon the few years where E3’s organisers tried to scale down its dominant presence on the yearly games calendar.

In response to this notion, Jean-Claude said, “Yeah, that was probably one of the reasons, as well as that five years ago [the industry was] growing fast in terms of the Gen 7 consoles. There was a massive public where we wanted to put a different mechanism in place versus our usual marketing plan. It was as well when large communities started to build and to transform the way we connect with our public, in terms of publishers, manufacturers etc.

“It was, I think, a good decision, because if we look back at the project now, it was 100,000 visitors, and we’re probably going to reach 300,000 this year, so it’s a massive change.”

Looking to the future, it’s entirely possible for the show to continue to expand and grow – there are plenty more halls to fill at the Paris expo, after all – but Jean-Claude notes that a key part of that growth is improving the quality of the show for the visitors.

“Our focus, especially this year, is that all the publishers and everybody invests a lot in the quality of the booths and the quality of the set up, multiplying the number of demo pods by two, in a way that we can minimise the queues. Especially with big blockbusters, the AAA games coming, like Call of Duty and Halo, we want to reduce that as much as we can. We also enlarge the alleys, and it’s based on being a really enjoyable show and now something that people are stressed about because there are too many people.

“So the number of people in our projections could be up to 400,000, and I don’t think it’s an issue, but we need to keep on improving the experience, that’s the critical one.”

The size and scale of the main hall of Paris’ expo centre seems to suit that goal quite nicely. It doesn’t sprawl across half a dozen halls as in Cologne – though it has the possibility to do so in future – nor is it as tightly packed as EGX was in Birmingham this year, but features one huge hall for the vast majority of the publishers and games on show, with a corner for merchandise and a large stage with row after row of chairs for viewing live eSports events.

Of course, the key factor from this year’s Paris Games Week which helped to propel the show into the public eye on a global scale was Sony’s appearance with a headline grabbing press conference. It’s something which could potentially spark a presence for PGW as a trade show in addition to being heavily consumer oriented.

“We have a challenge with the trade presence: the timing. Our market it organised with very precise timing, and from September to January is where the business is built. The seasonality is something that exists, clearly, and even if you have many products being released from February to September, the concentration of the revenue in this industry is 60% between September to January.

“So the market has not changed drastically, depending on how the studios plan their release. There could be a place for a trade show development, but that really depends on what goes on in terms of planning and release. For example, this year we have around 30 games that are available to play on publisher booths that are going to release in the first six months of 2016. That’s great for our public, so we love this.”

There’s always that buzz when a major manufacturer hosts a press conference, but Jean-Claude is understandably very realistic about the chance of them and other major companies hosting further press conferences in Paris. Gamescom, he notes, lost a lot of trade presence from being just a little bit too close to E3, with Sony not having much of interest to show at that point in time, while the distance has been restored for next year.

Having said that, if a company’s plans come to align once more, Sony’s appearance “put [PGW] in the international calendar as one of the main shows worldwide that could be a place where a publisher, a console manufacturer could come to announce.”

Paris Games Week and SELL, an organisation that has similar aims and goals with UKIE in the UK, is of course uniquely positioned to help promote home grown talent. Just as we see at other shows, it’s an excellent point for smaller developers in particular can get a stand, however small, and get their latest game into peoples’ hands.

Jean-Claude explained “We are trying to embrace all of the industry […] and it is as well an opportunity for us with local, much smaller developers or publishers to take this opportunity and the traffic we have during this week to start showcasing their products. Take the opportunity just to say that there is new content coming, innovation.

“This is even for the really small studios, because we have something like 25 French studios here, if I’m right, that could be a pretty large start up to the really small team that can have this opportunity. The cost for providing for small developers is really basic, it’s just the set up, and it is funded by the poly association, SELL – it’s our mission to promote the industry locally.”

Just as we’re seeing in many parts of the world, the videogame industry is starting to receive more and more support from governments. “Videogames are considered a cultural product in France more and more,” Jean-Claude said, and outlined some of the monetary efforts that have resulted from this. The past few years have seen French studios able to benefit from tax credits that can be applied to up to 40% of the cost, but just in the last few weeks, a fund of €50 million has been set up to help new developers get started.

The growth that Paris Games Week has seen over the course of the last half decade really helps to cement videogames as being culturally significant within France. Whether the likes of Sony or Microsoft will see Paris as a stage for their latest announcement in future, we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s clear that the show is going from strength to strength and doing so with the French consumer at its heart.