The video game sector in Catalonia has consolidated thanks to a firm commitment to talent. The industry, recognized worldwide, counts on creative professionals who have a fundamental weight in the entire value chain, from creation to development, including the publishing and distribution of video games. The Catalan video game industry is characterized by constant growth and specialized educational centers such as the Center for Image and Multimedia Technology of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (CITM-UPC) are a reference.

From October 9th to 11th, pavilion 1 of Fira Barcelona Montjuïc will turn the SAGA Barcelona Game Fest into a meeting point for video game lovers and professionals. Heir to the IndieDevDay and Retrobarcelona, the event is a gathering for the industry, creators, players, and video game culture, with a specific commitment to video games in Catalan and a professional dimension designed to connect the Catalan sector with the international ecosystem.

Catalonia is playing a strong hand. In little more than a decade, video games have gone from being a peripheral activity to becoming a cultural industry with international projection. Around it, an ecosystem has been woven that combines independent studios and multinationals, talent trained in universities, investment, incubators, events, and public policies. But there are also imbalances and a global context of uncertainty, marked by layoffs, studio closures, business concentration, and the emergence of generative artificial intelligence. The challenge is to consolidate the sector without losing talent and projects.

The video game not only shows a culture, but also allows you to immerse yourself in it: the player interacts with it, makes decisions, and uses the rules of the world that is proposed to them.

Diversity in video games is not limited to counting how many people from underrepresented groups work in a studio. It also involves asking which characters appear, which experiences are considered in the design, who is left out due to an accessibility barrier, and what behavior communities allow. Making an industry more diverse is not just about incorporating more profiles, but about rethinking games, gaming spaces, and rules of coexistence.

In the same way that the technologies involved in video games are diverse, we can expect that there will not be a single great technological leap that transforms the medium overnight. The very history of interactive electronic entertainment confirms that the great advances it has experienced have occurred through many simultaneous transformations: tools that allow creating faster, devices that modify the way of playing, loading or transition screens that disappear to give way to more immediate and immersive experiences, and platforms that make the device from which a game is executed less important. We also know that not everything we are promised the future will bring ends up arriving or having an impact that is not ephemeral, but it is a fact that technology changes how video games are made, how we play them, and also the environmental cost of producing them.

A video game can serve to unwind and let off steam... but it can also have purposes beyond the purely playful. When the main goal of a game goes beyond entertainment, we enter the territory of serious games, the serious games.

To nourish an entire industrial sector, professionals of all kinds are needed: programmers, artists, animators, designers, producers, sound and quality assurance specialists, marketing…

Between having a good idea and managing to turn it into a video game there is an abyss. And between publishing it and ensuring the studio can continue working, even more so. Catalonia has a network of incubators, accelerators, universities, and aid programs that attempts to reduce this gap, as well as a professional community that allows studios to look for partners, publishers and investors. But money continues to be one of the major bottlenecks.

Until very recently, the literary world and the world of video games were two parallel universes that barely touched each other, beyond some adaptation of a novel turned into a game. But in recent years, the publishing market has seen the birth and growth of a new genre that has moved from the margins to become a mass phenomenon. Dubbed LitRPG (the acronym stands for literary role playing game, in English), this trend brings together novels that use the tools of video games to advance the story. Characters have a health bar that decreases with enemy attacks, and as the plot progresses and they level up, they gain skill points that are recorded in the novel and acquire new weapons to face their opponents. They are essentially adventure books, full of challenges for their protagonists and designed for reader entertainment, but which at the same time delve into social and political issues of our present.

Enric Cabestany (Barcelona, 1981) is a restless entrepreneur. He makes the most of the 24 hours of the day, but tries to balance it with family life. For this reason, he has left the position of global vice president of marketing and editorial and general director of the Barcelona office of FunPlus, a Swiss video game multinational. Before that, he had a professional journey in Latin America and Silicon Valley. From here arose his relationship with apps, video games... and he made great friends in the world's technology capital. He then became involved with Asian tech companies and was in charge of the landing in Barcelona of the Chinese mobile video game company IGG in 2018. Today he participates in numerous technology projects, two of which are still linked to the world of video games.

"There is method in his madness," says Polonius, the king's advisor, referring to Hamlet. In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet pretends to be mad. But he only pretends to be so to gain time and prepare revenge against his father's murderer. With this metaphor, Christopher Tulloch, a professor of communication at Pompeu Fabra University, defines Donald Trump's communication strategy, also with the Iran war. In recent weeks, the official White House account has shared several videos on social media referring to video games like Call of Duty or Nintendo's Wii Sports. And with clips from movies like Braveheart, Superman or Top Gun. Frenetic scenes mixed with declassified images of attacks on Iranian facilities.

It has been ten years since a phenomenon that revolutionized the streets and phones of thousands of people around the world. The Pokémon Go app, an augmented reality game in which players have to go outside and search for creatures with their mobile camera, became a huge success. But the mobile cameras of users have served the game's creator, the company Niantic, to achieve a more ambitious goal. It has used the photos, without players knowing, to create a three-dimensional map of the world that autonomous robots will now use to move through the streets, especially when delivering packages and orders.

This Thursday marked the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of Dragon Ball, the television series that marked a generation of Catalans when it was shown on TV3. After 8 years without publishing new episodes and after several negotiations, the franchise has given the green light to a new season, Dragon Ball Super: Galactic Patrol, created by Toyotaro, disciple of Akira Toriyama, original author of the story of the monkey boy and who died in 2024 due to a cerebral hemorrhage. In this new installment, we will see how Goku and Vegeta join the galactic patrol with the aim of defeating the antagonist Moro.

"I have friends who have boyfriends or boys who come in to have sex," says Jana, 7, about some classmates who play on Roblox, a popular online video game platform that also allows users to program and play games created by themselves or other users. According to the company's latest reportThe platform continues to grow: by the end of 2025, it had 144 million daily users, who had dedicated 78.6 billion hours to the game throughout the year. This figure would be equivalent to the entire population of Catalonia (around 8 million people) playing Roblox 24 hours a day for more than a year.

On January 15, Amazon Prime Video released the first image of Sophie Turner – Sansa Stark in Game of Thunder– like in Lara Croft in the new series about the video game Tomb Raider. This image marks the start of filming, and the production is expected to premiere sometime in 2027, the same year in which a film based on another famous video game is also expected to be released. God of WarFor some years now, streaming platforms have been increasingly focusing on adapting successful video games, those with a strong fanbase, or those with compelling stories well-suited to a different format, into series.

Playing video games is a common activity in Catalan homes, especially during the Christmas holidays. For this reason, the Government of Catalonia has published "Shared Game: A Guide to Enjoying Video Games as a Family," a tool designed to help families transform digital gaming into a healthy, mindful, and shared experience. The guide offers practical advice and simple resources to help families support children and young people before, during, and after playing. It is an initiative of the Catalan Video Game Roundtable—a forum for industry stakeholders and the Government of Catalonia—promoted by the Department of Culture and developed jointly with the Departments of Education and Vocational Training and of Health, and with Good Game Generation, an organization specializing in promoting the educational and transformative use of video games.

The board of directors of the video game giant Electronic Arts (EA) has approved its sale to the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund PIF, the asset management firm Silver Lake Partners and the Affinity Partners fund, owned by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US President Donald Trump, for $55 billion (US$7 billion). This is one of the largest transactions in the history of the sector.

It all started with a team of five employees in a coworking space, and now there are 700. The American video game company Scopely settled in the Catalan capital in 2017, after visiting several European cities, to establish its technology headquarters. "They helped us the most in Barcelona," said Javier Ferreira, the multinational's co-CEO, at the inauguration of its new headquarters this Monday.

Gisela Vaquero (Besalú, 1984) is a video game designer, producer, and content creator. She is the founder of Jellyworld Games and the Women in Games association, which supports female video game developers.

She attended the Salvador Vilarrasa School in Besalú. "It was right next to my house, but I often woke up to the music already playing, signaling everyone was leaving, and I was always the last to arrive," she says. She was a very introverted child, "very quiet and calm." "My parents weren't around much. A relative looked after me; I used to call her." Uncle Botey, and he taught me the alphabet before I could even walk. We had a table with painted games, goose, checkers, chess, and he taught me how to play. And that stuck," she adds.

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