Two weeks have passed since the opening of the PC Gamer Showdown, almost, coincidentally, to the hour. We got the chance to sit down with a drink and a deputy editor of PC Gamer, known to his friends as Tim Edwards, so armed with a dictaphone, and Tom "DuRuS" Nevill, we set out to bring you PC Gamer's views on the event!

Tim will certainly be taking in feedback, not just from the previous discussion about the event, but from this topic too, so make sure you get your opinions down in a comment (not like we need to tell you guys to do that though, is it?)

Tim: Umm, well we’ve never done anything like this before, and the PC Gamer team itself is basically a bit of a shambles, and trusting us to organise anything is crazy. So actually getting Multiplay involved is the best thing we’ve done I think, they know what they’re doing, they’re smart guys, and they’ve just got super experience, so I think a lot of the reason the event has been successful is down to Multiplay’s organisation and just them... well imagine PC Gamer setting up a LAN, we can’t even turn our PCs on properly! I can touch a PC and it will break in like 5 minutes.

But at the same time, what PC Gamer brings is that we can get access to great games, like Left4Dead. Just look at the queue! The reason it is so long is it’s absolutely brilliant. So we can go and we can get these games in... I think we’ve got the basics for what should be a great event.

Tim: Well, the signups were... yeah, we completely cocked up in terms of the timing, and we cocked up in terms of how we communicated what was going on, because, you know, we’re a shamble! We will get better at this though, you can finely pinpoint where the shambles were. As for our expectations, anything could have happened frankly! It could have been a disaster, and we would have been serving Ross’s head on a platter to our guests, but everyone we’ve talked to said it was really good, a really good first event, some issues in various places, but you know, they’ve really enjoyed it and the thing that signed it is how many people asked us “are you going to do it again?”, so yeah.

Tim: That’s the plan... I think we want to.

Tim: Yeah... it’s difficult because, you know, why do we do it? We want to make some money, and that’s important, we want to increase PC Gamer’s visibility, and that’s really important, and actually as well, we want to work out what we should be doing in the magazine, and that’s important as well, because you know PC Gamer is a big entity, and we absorb a lot of things, but that means we have different audiences here, you’ve got people who come to see PC Gamer and to talk to us, which is why we did the thing last night (I don’t know if you guys enjoyed it because it’s basically a bunch of in-jokes and people getting drunk on stage), but then we’ve got the pro gamers who we’d like to introduce to PC Gamer, so what we do with the next one, who knows... maybe we should just have a picnic!

Tim: Well we were talking about this last night, and this is entirely speculation, so please don’t take anything into it, but I was saying that my favourite thing here wasn’t the big esports stuff, it was that we got a bunch of our readers, gave them free tickets, they’re guys who hang around in the PC Gamer forums and chat channels, they played in the TF2 tournament and they’ve gone home with £300. They played Four Kings and they got two taunt kills, and that’s the best thing that happened to them, and then they got all their guys doing the engineer’s dance on the capture point, 4k were furious, for wasting their time!

But those guys had a wicked time with that, and seeing those guys really happy, that’s what’s cool, so what I would like to have is maybe a smaller prize pot, but having the ability to give money away to maybe a larger amount of people, so if you can say “we’re going to give prizes to the top sixteen teams” rather than just the top eight, that to me seems quite interesting, but then that will have a knock-on effect - is it worth it for teams like 4k and dignitas to turn up for that? So who knows? We may end up giving a million pounds and a sandwich to everyone, but you know...

Tim: I don’t know, but...

Tim: I think we set out to make money, ummm... I can’t say because I’ll get in trouble. I’d love to tell you the gory financial details... but obviously it will come out in our financials so you can look it up eventually.

Tim: Good question actually, I don’t know... see one of the other plans we had was to do smaller regional events, where we’d have smaller venues, more regular events, we could use places like Omega Sektor, and other venues around the country, but one of the things exhibitors want is to have big crowds, and big crowds won’t come to smaller events, so I’m not sure.

Beers are very expensive here, that’s upsetting, and also apparently the campsite, you need to take a jetpack to get there.

Tim: One of the things is, we don’t really know what we’re doing. Let’s just get that out there. We’ve learned a bunch of stuff, and we know that if this is to happen... we don’t have a dedicated events manager for this, so we’ve had a marketing guy called Tom who you’ve met, and he’s really good, but he does have other responsibilities, so what I think this needs is a dedicated events manager who can look after it, make sure we’ve got all the messages out, make sure we’ve got a website that’s working, and we’ve got everything else.

What was the question...? Multiplay! Once we’ve got a dedicated events manager that facilitates our communication with Multiplay, because there’s one point of contact, and so on.

Tim: It’s funny actually... there is a number of different PC Gamers, there’s PC Gamer Sweden, PC Gamer US, we’ve just had PC Gamer Ukraine open up, there’s PC Gamer Russia, and some of those magazines take PC Gamer content, so some of the stuff we write in the UK gets put out into those magazines, and PC Gamer’s brand is at different strengths in those areas. We could do European events... we wouldn’t know where the fuck to start [laughs].

Tim: [asks cadred] What do you think PC Gamer would get out of that?

Tim: Well... yeah. I don’t know, this is a hard... [There follows a broken up conversation about the current state of pro gaming. Tim continues...] I think there’s a very specific reason why it took off so massively in Korea, and it’s partly economic and partly social, so you’ve got cheap entertainment plus a massively networked society plus you’ve got the LAN cafes and stuff, and that essentially creates an esports boom in that particular country.

Any event we do has to subscribe to what I think PC Gamer’s values are, and PC Gamer’s values are that I want everyone to have fun; I don’t want to be doing an exclusive event where people can’t come and have fun.

Tim: We ran an esports section in the magazine for about two years, that started in a magazine redesign five years ago. One of the jobs of the magazine is to allow the readers... to make the scene accessible. We can make quite hardcore development stuff accessible, we can make the crazy stuff that goes on in different games accessible, but we’ve really struggled with esports. Honestly, it’s the hardest thing in PC gaming to cover.

My major bugbear is that we should be covering it a shitload more. So yeah, we did two pages in every issue for about two years, and we’ve done a couple of one-off features about esports stuff, we did a couple of pages on the Korean stuff...

Tim: If the scene was big enough, I think a dedicated magazine is a better idea than a simple section of PC Gamer, because honestly, in the feedback we got when we did the reader surveys back when we had that section, around 2% of our readers actually read it. Think about what we would do. Our coverage in PC Gamer would be probably out of date, shallow, because it’s got to compete with basically every other subject in the magazine, it would be done by us, and we don’t know much. I don’t know, would an esports magazine work? It’s worth a punt I guess.

The thing is, print isn’t necessarily the right medium for this stuff. Sports weekly magazines, how do they work, or sports monthly magazines? Like there are rugby magazines, but the coverage is out of date, readerships are really dwindling... I’ll talk to my guys. They will almost certainly say “can we make money off it”, and that, that’s a big question.

The funny thing is there are dedicated MMO magazines out there, Eve Online has a magazine, there’s unofficial World of Warcraft magazines, but no official one. I’d love to do one actually... I like a lot of games.

Tim: Definitely not, and my girlfriend isn’t going to become an artist either. And no, I don’t date a five year old. PC Gamer is never embarrassed to make a tit out of ourselves... and here comes the biggest tit of them all [Ross, the PC Gamer Editor, walks over].

Tim: I’ve been to a couple of the I-Series events, including i34, I’ve been to a couple of other LAN events as parts of different press trips, and I host irregular LAN parties at my house. Are you allergic to cats? The last time I had a LAN party one of the guy’s who came turned out to be vastly allergic to my cat – “Shit! Clear!”. So yeah, I’ve been to a couple. How many have you been to? ... Fucking hell! You must have a lot of promotional t-shirts!

Was our event top10? [Cadred gives feedback] Yeah, we’ll get Ross to sell another county (the joke on the magazine is that Ross is very rich and he owns half of Berkshire), and we’ll get him to buy up esports. That’s clearly the solution. I’ll chip in a fiver.

Cadred would like to thank Tim for his time speaking to us, and for putting on the event, and we hope to be able to look forward to another PC Gamer event in the future!