Prague Gaming and Tech Summit is the event that will position itself in Central Europe this 2023 

March 16, 2023 | Exclusive Content

Hipther Agency, is a parent brand of WireUp, European Gaming, PICANTE, and Gaming Americas.

Digital Gaming News had the opportunity to talk to Zoltán Tundik via virtual interview and he shared with us the company’s development and upcoming events focused on Central Europe.

Zoltán is a self-taught publisher and event organizer who has developed several brands and services that have increased his company’s notoriety within multi-million dollar industries. In 2018, he has become a TEDx speaker and talked about reputation management in the digital age.

We know Hipther agency has several business verticals. Could you give us more information about each one?

Yeah, of course. It will take a lot of time to talk about each one, but I will talk about the most important ones. First, you need to know the history of how Hipther was actually founded. At first, it was Eastern European Gaming when we were focusing only on Eastern Europe. Then, later we also launched the European gaming website, with which we have, of course, covering more areas. And later we launched Picante, which wasn’t focused on the gaming industry. It focused on artificial intelligence, blockchain, politics, and everything else. And, of course, later we also launched our social media and events. So we needed a parent brand to cover all these areas. So that’s how we came up with this new word “Hipther”, which sounds very funny to some, but yeah, we like it and we use it ever since then. 

More things about the vertical. So basically we covered the gaming industry. Around 70% is via media and events, and the rest of the 30% is allocated towards other industries such as blockchain, fintech, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and whatever, uh, trending tech topics there are. So we have 24 websites at the moment. We have four yearly in-person conferences and also host 12 virtual meetups for the gaming industry and different tech industries. So that would be, in a nutshell, the information about our brands. Our most important one is European Gaming, which is also a Google News publisher, uh, Gaming Americas, which covers the gaming industry in North and Latin America.; and Picante. Picante is also one of the websites that we are very proud of. 

You also mentioned Wire Up when doing my introduction. Wire Up is a social media platform, which we launched in 2020 to host our own virtual conferences because, back then, we could not host any in-person conferences due to travel restrictions. So that’s why we had this in the works for a while. So we did that in 2020.

We know that you also organize important events for the gaming industry. We would like to know the opinion of an expert like you are, on the development of the industry right now.

All right. So I’m not an expert. I’m just doing this as something that we love and we’re passionate about. So yeah, we are hosting conferences since 2016 when we started the first in-person conference in Budapest, which focused on the Central and Eastern European gaming industry. 

These events, after that, we needed to focus also on other regions. So that’s why we launched the Mare Balticum series, which tours the Baltic area and focuses on the Baltic and Scandinavian regions. The Prague Gaming Summit is another one; Central and Eastern European Conference complements the CGC Budapest, but one of them takes place in spring and the other one in autumn, so that way we can cover all ground. And we also have the European Gaming Congress, which will be rebranded this year. We will have the announcement soon, which covers mostly all parts of Europe. We also have the European Gaming Congress, which will change its name this year. We will announce it soon, and it covers almost all of Europe. I am very pleased with our evolution over the last eight years and our growth in the seminar and boutique-style conferences, as we call them. 

This year we are seeing record numbers of attendance at the conferences, considering that it is the first year after the pandemic, i.e. there are no restrictions anywhere. So that’s how I think things are going to go for the event industry and there will be a lot of attendees everywhere.

We know that you have several events scheduled for this year, and we would like you to tell us more about the Gaming and tech summit 2023 that will be held at the end of March.

We are very excited about this conference because this is the first time that we are putting together two conferences. We were hosting Prague Gaming Summit since 2017 and, since 2019, we were also hosting the tech conference in Europe. Both of them were in Prague, so now we decided to put them together, have a new conference called Prague Gaming and Tech Summit, and allocate one more day to the conference. So it’s a two-day event now, giving room for inviting more speakers from multiple industries. Either way, the gaming industry is the main focus of the conference. But the other tech verticals that are going to be discussed at the conference are tied together with the gaming industry and have been working together for the past maybe three or four years because blockchain has had a huge impact on the industry. Artificial intelligence has an impact on the payments that are the backbone of the industry because without payments there would not be any industry facilitating online payments, etcetera. KYC as well as cyber security. We’re also focusing on cybersecurity because that’s something that we are very fond of speaking about. It’s impacting many businesses this year. And we hosted a podcast, uh, where we talked about this stuff and it seems that the pandemic has brought all these problems, cyber security because many people have switched to remote working from home and there did not have any secure Wi-Fi or did not have any secure lines or worked on securing their computers.

They use their personal computers for work as well. So that’s how we got to this point where cyber security has to be taken very seriously. So these are some of the topics we’re where we’re going to talk about. We’re focusing on the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, and most probably Liechtenstein as well. But we are going to have a session also dedicated to the US gaming industry, which is something new, for the central and Eastern European landscape. 

And that’s about it in terms of topics, we also have many networking sessions at the conference, uh, like welcome drinks, networking, run, and breakfast and breaks parties. And yeah, we’re also adding some roundtable discussions where some of the delegates can step aside from the conference, go to a quiet place, and talk with experts about things that they would not ask in front of a public.

We also know that you do virtual events focused on the American market, such as the Q Meetups, and we would like you to tell us more about what is the purpose of it.

The Quarterly Meetups actually something that we launched in 2021 because in 2020 when we switched to virtual conferences, we decided that in 2021 we will not host any in-person conferences and have the experience of hosting six virtual conferences, all of them two days with the content of eight hours per day for gaming Americas and for the European Gaming Conference Tech conferences. We´ve seen the feedback from the people that stand in front of the screen all day, not just the speakers, but also, especially the delegates. So that’s how we came up with this idea to filter it down and only have 2 to 3 hours of content and create these types of meetups that only have 1 or 2 panels with four speakers on each panel. That way you can easily just switch on Zoom or YouTube and start viewing the filtered content, I mean filtered content and none of the nonsense and everything, and it’s straight-to-the-point talks in a laid-back style. So nobody is very tense that they need to stick to the time and something like that. So yeah, we will keep doing it and this is now a permanent thing in our portfolio. So the virtual quarterly meetups are something that we are going to do from now on. Of course, we did it for the past two years, so we will continue. The American one actually focuses on North America and Latin America where we invite experts to share the latest updates in the past three months. That’s why it’s called quarterly meetups because it’s hosted every three months. And, yeah, that’s about it. I must add that it’s free to attend. So basically you just register once and you just receive the update when the next quarterly meetup is online. There is also the chance to view it on YouTube for free without having the need to sign up. And, you get the recording if you missed it. 

Thank you Zoltán! Now we know a little more about Hipther Agency, which you can find at the following link: https://hipther.agency/

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