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Image credit: Norwich Games Festival – The Forum – Luke Witcomb
Norwich Games Festival 2025 will feature a panel dedicated to working in esports, featuring a selection of UK talent.
The event will take place from May 26th to 31st 2025 at The Forum, Millennium Plain, NR2 1TF, and other local venues, from 10am to 4pm each day (5pm on Saturday 31st).
Norwich Games Festival is billed as ‘a celebration of video and computer games, tabletop and board games and physical gaming and activities’.
It’s run by The Forum Trust (a self-financing charitable organisation which manages The Forum building in Norwich) alongside lead partner Norwich University of the Arts, and features a host of free and low-cost activities. These include a trader and collector day on May 26th featuring tabletop and card games, merch and playable game spaces.
From May 27th to 31st there will be an Educator Zone, Creator Zone, Playable Zone and talks and workshops.
One of the main aims is ‘to showcase and champion Norwich as a progressive hub for games in the UK, celebrating and highlighting the local talent and skills, with a particular focus on the games and tech education sector’.
The event started out as a retro arcade in 2012 during the Easter Holidays, and evolved to encourage local games developers to showcase their games and skills.
In 2019, the last time the festival ran for six days, it drew approximately 58,000 people. It relaunched in 2024, with Ellie Buchan joining as Games Festival Producer, and welcomed more than 27,000 visitors for a three-day festival. Now it’s returning to a six-day event.
‘How to work in esports’ panel at Norwich Games Festival 2025
This will consist of a panel of esports professionals offering career tips and advice, and explaining what it’s really like working in esports.
The panel has been put together by Esports News UK and includes the following panellists:
- Callum ‘Cal’ Dornan, founder of SAF esports team
- Joe Brady, esports photographer
- Leyna ‘Affinity’ McQuillin, esports host and commentator (Valorant and Counter-Strike) and esports university student
- Harry ‘Hazza’ Chapman, esports host and commentator (Valorant and Counter-Strike)
- Moderator: Dominic Sacco, founder of Esports News UK
It will take place on Saturday May 31st 2025 from 1.45pm at The Forum, Millennium Plain, NR2 1TF, at the Norwich Games Festival.
It is a paid ticketed event because organisers don’t charge people to attend the main festival, so it’s how it generates income to pay for content, alongside what it subsidises as the charity.
See more info about the esports panel at Norwich Games Festival and grab tickets here.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
