SA gaming expo caters to growing local market

Decades ago, a horse-riding accident left the man who played the original Man of Steel wheelchair-bound, but a miniature Christopher Reeve-era Superman statue, "unboxed" on Friday in Cape Town, will still easily sell for the hefty R8500 asking price.

The "unboxing" of the statue took place at the inaugural Electronics and Gaming Expo held in the city this weekend.

Gamers, comic book collectors, cosplayers (people who dress up as gaming characters) and other techno geeks all came together for the three-day event, at which 60 exhibitors demonstrated their newest products for a growing local market.

"There are people here with dedicated rooms for a statue or figurine collection, where they may have every single release of a certain line or company's products," said Nizar Abrahams, owner of Readers Den, the oldest comic shop in Cape Town.

"Amazing amounts of money are spent. I would estimate that there are a few [people] with collections worth over R100000. The biggest private collection in Cape Town is someone with at least half a million rands' worth of stuff."

Expo organiser Johnny Malherbe said the event was meant to bring together all aspects of the gaming and electronics industry.

Make Games SA chairman Martin le Roux said a 2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers study showed that using cellphones for gaming was on the rise and eclipsing PCs and consoles, although this was not reflected at the expo.

Gaming expert Clint O'Shea said the most popular competitive gaming was still on PCs.

"It has a massive audience and that's mainly down to the kind of tournaments running internationally," O'Shea said. "Some of these tournaments offer over $10-million [about R121.5-million] in cash prizes."

Le Roux said most of South Africa's games developers created them for an international market due to a lack of interest in locally themed games. "There have been games developed with South African themes, but they have all failed. There was one where you were a car guard and had to protect the parking lot. It also failed."

The expo ends today.