Living in the capital of such an amazing country as Spain has many perks.

If you already live here you will already know for sure, but for the ones who have not been to Madrid before, you will have a full plate when you get lucky and come…

Important museums…

(sorry, let me stop the podcast for a sec so I can focus).

As I was saying, very important museums with priceless works of art like Museo del Prado or Reina Sofia, large gardens where you can enjoy the scenery and the fantastic weather like El Retiro, or gastronomic tours around the Madrid of the Austrians (the Spanish royal dynasty of the Hapsburg), among many other things.

You are probably wondering what is the point of me rambling about Madrid and promoting its touristic wonders in a post about eSports…

(Don’t worry, the mayor of Madrid is not giving me a cut or anything like that)

All I just told you about Madrid is true and is great, but if you came here between the 18th and 21st of October, you better forget about the museums and gastronomic tours.

On those dates, Madrid Games Week was taking place, and culture in Madrid gained a new focus in IFEMA.

I am not going full capital letters so you don’t think I am yelling at you, but the fact is that video games and derivatives are part of the culture of modern generations, no matter who likes it or not.

Of course, we had to be at IFEMA to bring this great event to you.

We had press passes that allowed us to avoid the lines, but we were there early because we do make the effort for you, guys.

And those lines…

You cannot imagine the size of the lines to get to the event, if someone still thinks e-sports and video games are a bad sector to invest, I invite them to come to one of these events with us.

Forget the stereotype of a handful of adolescents with bad acne waiting for a half-empty show.

Whole families going together, three generations from grandpa to the grandchild.

I don’t know if the children convinced the grandparents and parents to come, or if the parents transmitted the passion to their children and brought the grandparents to share the atmosphere and excitement…

I have no idea, what I do know is that it was a beautiful sight.

You can read about all the cutting-edge brands from the consumer electronics industry that went to the event anywhere else, so I will not tell you about it. I will tell you about what you don’t expect…

We could see the Francisco de Vitoria University with their own booth in the Madrid Games Week, because like I already told you, this is culture, and higher education institutions have the need if not the obligation to be in large-scale cultural events.

But universities are just the start, many other businesses that you probably would find weird to find in this kind of event were right there, breaking molds and getting their piece of the pie.

Large telecommunications groups like Movistar, Orange, and Vodafone, sponsoring eSports teams.

You could even find a great exhibition of sports cars and race cars to promote the last release of Gran Turismo and the European Finals.

But maybe strangest things to find here still for many people is to find innumerable job positions in this kind of event…

There are already boot camps for future gaming pros, and we could see exactly this in the stand of Elite Gaming Center in live demonstrations, and they also gave us information about the Gamercamp in another booth.

Two great examples of opportunities to promote the talent of new gamer generations.

And I have to say that we were weak, the temptation won, and we could not resist trying all those peripherals put in the show by all the classic gaming brands.

(I am really sorry, it won’t happen again. *fingers crossed behind my back*)

And to say goodbye (let me unpause the podcast again), I’d love to introduce you to the world of e-sports for mobile platforms.

This is a growing industry and the launch of Diablo Immortal for mobile devices is just confirming this huge growth.

(although many gamers hate this…)

I am sure we will have a post tackling this in-depth, but as an early gift, I will leave you some photos of the Clash Royale semifinal that we saw live, between the team from Madrid, MAD Lions of Jorge Schnura, and Heretics, the team of the controversial TheGrefg. No spoilers!