One of the big topics at the convention will be e-sports, a rapidly growing segment of the market in which sports brands and retailers have started to invest, mainly through sponsorships and by opening dedicated corners in sporting goods stores.
At this year's event, one of the workshops will have the title “Copycat or Innovation?! – Sponsoring and Marketing in eSport,” held in cooperation with the German association for sports economics and sports management (VSD).
On top of that, a masterclass will be given on the history of e-sports by the Sportbusiness Campus, an educational institute. Representatives from the streaming platform Twitch, the market research company Nielsen and the German TV stations ProsiebenSat1 and Sport1 will be on hand to further discuss the e-sports market.
One big piece of news is that this year's summit will see the debut of a parallel event beginning on the same day at the same venue. The inaugural Electronic Sports Competition (ES_Com) is scheduled for July 3-7, 2019, and will be open to attendees of the Ispo Digitize Summit. Billed as southern Germany's largest e-sports and gaming festival, ES_Com is expected to draw hobby, amateur and semi-professional gamers to either watch or compete in such games as League of Legends, Rocket League, Fifa 19, RaceRoom Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Just Dance and the NHL series from Electronic Arts.
The tournaments will be live-streamed on Twitch and elsewhere. There will also be a multi-player virtual-reality platform, called Hologate, for visitors to try out e-sports and a 72-hour Lan (local-area network) party set to begin on July 5. On the festival's final day, some 1,000 players will compete in the world's largest offline Fifa tournament. The full program and tickets will soon be available via the Ispo website: www.ispo.com.
