Dubai Character and Licensing Fair

I just got back from vis­it­ing the Dubai Char­ac­ter and Licens­ing fair and decided to post a mini-reportage of this fair and inform you of what’s hap­pen­ing here in a series of posts enti­tled “Dubai Char­ac­ter Fair” of which this is the first part.

The fair started on Tues­day 27^th of Octo­ber and goes on till the 29^th but next year the date will be moved by a month and it will start in Novem­ber. The orga­niz­ers decided, and rightly so, that the show was too adja­cent to other impor­tant shows like MIP­COM, which is one of the major events of the year.

The exhi­bi­tion takes place at the Dubai con­ven­tion and exhi­bi­tion cen­ter or World Trade Cen­ter as it is called here. The loca­tion is extremely well con­structed and planned for all kinds of exhi­bi­tions and the orga­niz­ers are very metic­u­lous about their plan­ning. This venue is in fact com­prised of two major events with one obvi­ously being  the Char­ac­ter and Licens­ing Fair and the other, the Dubai Game Exhibition.

I had attended this same exhi­bi­tion last year very shortly and the things that were most notice­able were the absence of many impor­tant com­pa­nies from the region. All in all the show was very scarce this year and it appears that the global reces­sion had even touched the char­ac­ter and licens­ing indus­try in the region. Although the orga­niz­ers insisted that the num­ber of char­ac­ters had tripled this year I didn’t get that impres­sion and it was obvi­ous that the show was not as pop­u­lar as last year; more about that in the fol­low­ing posts.

Freej is one of the most famous and suc­cess­ful licenses cre­ated and launched in the Mid­dle East and last year their stand was impres­sive boast­ing a huge and beau­ti­fully crafted minia­ture model of the vir­tual city the show takes place in. There were Freej mem­o­ra­bilia all around the stand and every­where else you looked. This year I couldn’t even find their stand; I may have over­looked and may find them tomor­row but their par­tic­i­pa­tion is surely not at the same scale this year.

The absence of TV chan­nels was also notice­able. Space­Toon was one of the chan­nels that par­tic­i­pated along a few oth­ers but this year the only one I have spot­ted so far is Car­toon Network.

The show also has a con­fer­ence pro­gramme for both Char­ac­ter and Game sum­mit and although the level isn’t that of a Sig­graph, the speak­ers are gen­er­ally very inter­est­ing and choose rather good sub­jects for their ses­sions. More on that later….

The most amaz­ing moment came when I saw the Iran­ian pavil­ion in the Game Expo with at least 8 com­pa­nies attend­ing with some games that were far from bad. One of these games called Gar­shasp is appar­ently doing very good and has attended sev­eral major exhi­bi­tions. I wish them and the other com­pa­nies good luck.

In my next post for this series I’ll go into more details about the com­pa­nies attend­ing and prob­a­bly post some pic­tures too.

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