Beyond, the bright and garish colours of a myriad of blinking lights and the tinkling musical sound from giant digital gaming columns competed with eccentrically dressed compares daring you to “give it a go”.

Anyone who parachuted into Lisbon’s Feira Internacional de Lisboa (FIL) on Tuesday to Thursday last week, could have been forgiven for momentarily thinking they’d arrived in Las Vegas, but this was the 2nd Lisbon edition of the SBC Summit - the largest gaming industry event in Europe, and certainly one of the largest in the world.

Some 30,000 delegates and visitors passed through the fair venue turnstiles at the event which ran from Tuesday September 16 through to Thursday September 18, making this the largest trade fair in the city other than Web Summit with over 71,000 attendees and which returns to Lisbon in November.

“This event has reached a milestone and that means at lot to us. For a show that began not too long ago, it’s been encouraging to see just how much support and enthusiasm it has gained from across the industry”, says SBC Event Director, Paul Mills.

Just a quick scan through the numbers gives an idea of the sheer scale of the event, which in addition to the 30,000 registered attendees, also involved 700 sponsors and exhibitors and around 5050 speakers.

And compared to last year’s event, it’s only getting bigger with a 20% attendance increase on 2024 with 16 new countries added to the 150 countries represented at the first Lisbon edition. Occupied floor space had increased from 110,000m2 in 2024 to 135,000m2 this year and there were 235 new sponsors.

Nearly everyone who is anyone in the world of gaming - an industry worth approximately US$190Bn worldwide according to recent forecasts from Newzoo and GamesHub, a 3.4% year-on-year increase largely driven by console sales and the continued strength of premium PC and console games - was there.

In fact, there were 5,969 company-level movers and shakers, with a 31% increase in operator attendance and a 38% increase in affiliate attendance.

And in terms of regional audience growth, delegates had came from far and wide from the four corners of the earth - a 20.9% increase from the US and Canada, +40.4% from Latin America, +49% from Europe, +78.2% from Africa, +68.8% from Asia, and +18.6% from Australia and New Zealand.

Impressive headliners

But it was the quality of this year’s impressive headliners that really made this year’s SBC Summit sparkle with keynote presentations from serial entrepreneur and marketing powerhouse Gary Vaynerchuk, the founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media, Randi Zuckerberg (the sister of Mark Zuckerberg), the Formula 1 legend Rubens Barrichello, and the undisputed heavyweight champion Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk.

And since sport is inextricably linked to gaming, there was a veritable constellation of over 20 football legends from the past present at the happening, including former Italian international player Alessandro Del Piero, former Spanish international, Gaizka Mendieta, ex-Slovak International Marek Hamsik, former Brazilian international Roberto Carlos, and ex-Greek international Giorgos Karagounis.

One of the undoubted highlights of the three-day summit was the Legends Charity Football Game held in Lisbon’s Alvalade on Monday 15, which is likely to raise nearly €1 million for charitable causes and help communities suffering from the effects of war and local tensions around the world when the final tally comes in.

The Portuguese home squad made up of veteran players Figo, Nani, Tiago, Alves, Coentrão, Pepe, Quaresma, Maniche, Pauleta and Bosingwa took on a strong international team of legends comprising Larsson, Hamsik, Zanetti, Kaka, Terry, Cech, Karembeu, Saviola, Materazzi, Mendieta and Puyol, and won 4-1.

Refinement

Dennis Algreen (SBC Senior Marketing Director) said that the second year in Lisbon had brought a lot of refinement to the event. “We hit our target of over 30,000 attendees, a 20% increase on last year for what is our biggest flagship event.”

“We also further globalised the event, which is part of what we wanted to achieve, with 16 more countries to the list bringing the total to 150 counters, so we are definitely seeing more international and global attendance,” he said.

Algreen also said he was proud of the fact that there were nearly 6,000 C-level decision-makers - senior executives, typically with titles starting with "Chief" (like CEO, CFO, COO). “I am fairly confident that this is the highest percentage of senior decision-makers of any industry event.”

“We also had quite a high number of keynote speakers and sports stars, and took great care to ensure that we started infusing these events with more and more outside knowledge, not necessarily from the industry, but we are learning from some of the other industries, particularly tech pioneers, which is why we brought in Gary Vaynerchuk and Randi Zuckerberg to help people better understand ideas around Artificial Intelligence and Data Trading.”

In terms of impact for Lisbon, “we brought in 30,000 attendees into a city of 500,000 with significant impact for hotels and restaurants with an estimated 72,000 room nights booked and we are still calculating the final financial impact for the city, so this has a significant impact for the local community.”

Andy McCarron (SBC Managing Director). “This has been our biggest event from different geographies and has become our global event with networking is a massive part of it which is why we invested so much in our networking opportunities across the three days.”

“We added tech academies, somewhere founded and centered around the industry disciplines, but some on the periphery, covering AI, Web 3.0, Blockchain, and Gamification”, he concluded.

Picture caption: Dennis Algren (L) and Andy McCarron (R) were pleased as Punch at this year’s SBC Summit which brought 30,000 attendees and million in euros to Lisbon hoteliers, restaurants and traders.