SYLVIA McKEOWN: Brands fight hard for SA’s burgeoning gamers’ industry
Lights whirled and flashed as 34,002 gaming, comic and geek-culture fans descended on the Ticketpro Dome in Johannesburg for rAge 2018. SA’s longest-running annual video-gaming, computer, technology and geek-culture exhibition was packed to the brim with enthusiastic fans in various forms of dress, enthusiastically bashing buttons at the gaming stations of their choice. The scene mirrored Comic-Con not three weeks earlier, which oddly — save the many stands in the bottom echelons of the fair — seemed to be dominated by gaming hardware stations battling it out for the 40,000 wide-eyed geeks’ attention. It was evident attending these festivals that there is a frantic bid to get a hold over SA’s growing gaming industry, which cracks nearly R100m a year. This is no doubt in part due to the increase in boundary-crossing games such as Fortnite, the biggest online free game in the world with 125-million active players across PC, console and mobile platforms. SA has experienced an unprecede...
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