Features
C3 Announces Metarama Vegas Festival Combining Gaming, Esports And Music
– Metarama
C3 Presents unveiled today its plans for Metarama, a new festival to be held at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds Oct. 19-20, blending live music and video games.
The event is being put on in partnership with Esports Hospitality Concepts. The dual founders of EHC, Scott London and Seth Schorr, have worked with numerous esports companies and boast experience with “hundreds of live esports events in Las Vegas.”
The official announcement is short on specifics: artists, live games, comedy, cosplay and streaming are all being promised and follow-up information is available via social media, email notification and a dedicated discord server.
Metarama means not only is one of North America’s premier large-festival promoters entering into the esports/gaming space but, as C3 Presents was acquired by Live Nation in 2014, it marks the world’s largest concert promoter’s entry.
The city of Vegas was a natural selection for the location, C3 Presents partner Charlie Walker told Pollstar, as local institutions like the Luxor Hotel and Casino – which partnered with Allied Esports to transform its nightclub into a 1,000-cap esports arena in 2017 – are making Vegas a prime gaming town.
“We looked for a great festival site as well as a fun, easy city to travel to that has gaming culture embedded,” Walker said, adding that the festival is for “everyone who likes having fun,” and that “gaming and music go together, the fans are the same, everyone loves music and nowadays everyone games, so it feels like a natural combination. The gamers are rock stars and vice versa.”
The Las Vegas Festival Grounds is owned and operated by MGM Resorts, which also owns the Luxor and is clearly making a move towards engaging millennials and Gen-Z gamers.
“We’ve closely watched the growth and excitement around esports, and we are always looking for new amenities for our Vegas customers,” Luxor GM Niklas Rytterstrom said in 2017.
The Las Vegas Sun reported earlier this year that the Festival Grounds were seeing more use since the Las Vegas Village, the site of the Route 91 Harvest shooting in October 2017, is now defunct.