An international festival dedicated to video game creations will be held in October next year in Cannes, Robin Leproux, former president of PSG, and Antoine de Tavernost, CEO of the Auditoire agency, announced Thursday
The Cannes Gaming Festival, video-game version of the Cannes Film Festival, will be organised around an award ceremony in the spirit of the major events in Cannes.
“Discussing with the teams of the city of Cannes, I had an idea," Leproux, now co-founder of the Paris-based gaming centre Espot - Europe's largest - told AFP. " I said to myself: 'We do not have an international festival for the 10th art, which is the video game; the equivalent of Cannes for the 7th art, the cinema ."
"Once I had this idea, I told myself it was absolutely necessary to organise it,” Robin Leproux,
The former president of PSG (2009-2011) and ex-director of M6 teamed up with Antoine de Tavernost, head of the events communication agency Auditoire, to create this festival dedicated to “the world’s leading cultural industry” in terms of turnover, far ahead of the music and film industries.
“We want to give the (video game) industry this breath of air and the recognition it deserves,” said de Tavernost, for whom Les Pégases, a ceremony which since 2020 has rewarded the best French video game creations, would be more like the “Caesars” for French cinema.
The award ceremony for the first “Cannes Gaming Festival” will be headed by an “international” jury made up of “legitimate, well-known and passionate personalities” to reward “creations and artists” from the world over in a “hybrid show” - both in-person and digital - the co-founders say.
From 2024, the festival will be held over five days, integrating meetings dedicated to professionals and a festival for the general public in addition to the awards ceremony.
