[section_title title=i55 – Our Thoughts!]
i55 – Our Thoughts!
After a long weekend of essentially walking around a crowded exhibition hall, having our female staff being pushed to the ground for no actual reason other than an over-zealous idiot, and meeting some of the most passionate (and unpassionate) indie game developers, event was alright. All in all, it was a mixed bag.
If we were to look back at i49 which took place in Telford, I would have to say that the entire event has gone a direction in which a lot of people would agree to be detrimental to the past glory days of Multiplay’s Insomnia events. The focus is all about commercialism with a reliance on making as much money as they can from whoever they can attract to the events. Of course gamers get put down the pecking order to do this, and I feel Multiplay need to remember who made this event in the first place—the gamers!
Game took firm acquisition of Insomnia from Multiplay which means Wizzo (and his mum) are now at the say-so of the corporate money mining machine, and with future events hailing from the NEC arena in Birmingham, will the events get any better? Well hopefully the larger space will be utilised in a way which helps us all and not be used as a reason to fill it with more corporate crap. Even Multiplay acknowledged the amount of “children” running riot around the event during the pub quiz; the best part of the entire weekend in our opinion!
Hopefully the heavy handed security concerns will be addressed and that we get an apology for how our female member of staff was assaulted needlessly by a rampaging YouTube escorting security meat head. That might make things a little better because that wasn’t the only incident we were made aware of from LAN goers and of course even exhibitors who agreed that the security failed to do ANY aspect of their job properly.
Fix those issues in time for the move to the NEC Arena and I think Multiplay can move forward, but they need us, they need us gamers and consumers more than they will ever realise!
The question being, are we likely to attend i56? The ball is in your court guys. Ideally we’d like a response on the problems we encountered. I would like to hope that with the move to Birmingham NEC, that floor space will be increased and that security arrangements won’t be so thuggish. Kind of a new start, if you will.
What did you think of i55? How did you find it? Let us know your comments below or on social media. We’d love to hear from you.
A mixed day thing !