Paris Games Week

Paris Games Week (PGW) is an annual exhibition dedicated to the computer games industry held at the Paris expo Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France. The event has been held annually since 2010 by the French organization SELL (French: Syndicat des éditeurs de logiciels de loisirs), which promotes the interests of computer games developers.

Paris Games Week is the world’s fifth largest gaming event, ahead of E3 in the United States and Tokyo Game Show, with a total of 317,000 visitors and 194 exhibitors attending in 2019; and the second largest gaming exhibition of the year in Europe, behind gamescom in Germany.

History

The Paris Games Week exhibition was created on the initiative of the SELL organization (French: Syndicat des éditeurs de logiciels de loisirs), the French union of the association of entertainment software producers, in October 2010. Prior to Paris Games Week, France also hosted two major annual gaming exhibitions dedicated to computer games, including: Micromania Game Show (MGS), created in 2002 by specialized dealer Micromania, and Festival du jeu vidéo (FJELD), created in 2006 by Games Fed. These events were held annually in the fall in Ile-de-France. Despite their growing attendance over the years, these exhibitions, did not bring enough exclusives and games that could play an important role in competing with other world-class exhibitions such as Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) or Tokyo Game Show (TGS).

In 2009, the French company SELL (French: Syndicat des éditeurs de logiciels de loisirs) partnered with the organizers of the Festival du jeu vidéo, bringing many exclusives to the event, thus allowing the exhibition to achieve record attendance. Later in March 2010, coincidentally, SELL decided to create its own exhibition of computer video games, called Paris Games Week, despite the success of the Festival du jeu vidéo event, which did not live up to expectations. This decision, according to the Gamekult portal, is similar to the decision taken by the German federal association BIU (German Bundesverband Interaktive Unterhaltungssoftware) to move the existing Games Convention exhibition to Cologne in 2009, thus deciding to organize its own fair called gamescom, at the same time as the Games Convention, thus bringing major video game publishers to a new exhibition on a larger scale.

Paris Games Week was first held in 2010 between October 27 and 30. In its first year, the show had between 56,000 and 120,000 visitors and 28 exhibitors, according to various reports. As of 2019, the number of visitors to the show has reached the 317,000 mark. Paris Games Week is usually held annually in the last week of October or the first days of November in the vast modern complex of the Paris expo Porte de Versailles exhibition center. Paris Games Week is currently the world’s fifth largest gaming event, ahead of E3 and Tokyo Game Show, with a total of 317,000 visitors and 194 exhibitors attending in 2019; and the second largest gaming exhibition of the year in Europe, behind Germany’s gamescom.