The objective is simple and could make you smile: bring together on June 1st at the Angers Convention Center business leaders around a LAN, for “Local area network”: a competition of networked video games, as we practiced in the late nineties and early two thousand years, before gamers started playing online. “Many business leaders today in their forties have grown up with this, testifies Benjamin Tardif, founder of Videoflex and initiator with Antoine Galpy of the first edition of Gamenbiz. We want to address all those who played twenty years ago, and who still play. They are in their forties or older and we offer them the opportunity to rediscover the spirit of these LANs by challenging themselves with games from the era. But it is still a business event.”
Network games and conferencing
The organizers have indeed planned a convivial moment with video games, and the event will end with a conference, still on this theme, with the presence, according to the two quadras who do not want to reveal more, of a ” gaming industry veteran. “We remain business leaders, specifies Antoine Galpy, director for 20 years of several companies in the tech field. We organize something serious, in an atmosphere that suits us. Business events are often serious with a friendly moment. There, it will be fun with a little seriousness!” The two leaders are working on the project with the two founders of the Angers incubator WeForge, Simon Gérard and Julien Fournier. The objective is to bring together a hundred players. Registrations have been launched and the concept is already appealing: “People will come with their headphones and their good humor, adds Antoine Galpy. “
The organizers of this first edition of Gamenbiz do not want to settle for a single event. They intend to continue the experiment, at the rate of two events per year: “We want to create a long-term community, specifies Benjamin Tardif, with two editions per year. The concept is also planned to be duplicated elsewhere, in other cities, if we have such requests.”
