Are Video Games the Festival Venues of the Future?

The year 2020 is a very bad one for live music events. One of the measures imposed by most countries around the world as a response to the pandemic was to ban gatherings with more than a few dozen, perhaps a few hundred participants, making concerts and music festivals – that usually gather tens or even hundreds of thousands of attendees – literally impossible. 

But as you might expect, event organizers are not sitting on their hands waiting for the pandemic to finally go away. If they can’t organize events in real life, they are actively looking for alternative venues to hold virtual events. In the last few months, we’ve seen everything from sing-alongs on Zoom to virtual proms on YouTube, and even some events that were held inside video games.

Electric Blockaloo

Electric Blockaloo will be a “virtual rave” that will take place inside Microsoft’s block-based sandbox game Minecraft, between June 25-28. The lineup of the event is pretty impressive if you happen to be into the genre: it has dozens of performers on its lineup ranging from A-Trak and Borgore to Diplo and Zhu. 

Rave (dot) Family, the company behind the event, calls this “the new normal” on its website. “While we aren’t doing many camping or music festivals these days, we ARE still bringing people together to connect with each other, create shared spaces to enjoy art, and celebrate the culture our passionate fans have helped create,” their website reads. 

Astronomical

Rapper Travis Scott has been the protagonist of three successful concert tours between 2015 and 2019 and he would’ve continued this year… except he couldn’t due to the public health crisis that swept across the world. So, he took it to cyberspace instead.

Travis Scott’s “Astronomical” event was held inside Fortnite, a very popular battle royale shooter by Epic Games, between April 24-26. There were actually five events held at different times catering to fans across time zones.

The event series was an unexpected success: more than 27.7 million unique players viewed the show more than 45 million times from all over the world, of which 12.3 million tuned in to the premiere alone. 

This was not the first ‘concert’ held inside the game – last February, American DJ-producer Marshmello held a virtual concert inside Fortnite that attracted more than 10 million players to the game. Scott’s virtual event was, in turn, different – instead of going with a “traditional” format where the performer performs on a scene, surrounded by fans, Scott’s event was a more experimental experience: the rapper took the form of a giant walking around in a series of increasingly settings like outer space, underwater or even a floating amusement park. Some say this event was a template for the future of interactive music videos.

A recent survey conducted by gaming intelligence specialist Newzoo has found that many gamers spent more time inside their favorite online games while in lockdown for social interaction. It seems that video games are more than just that – they may just be the festival venues of the future…