If you ever wished a giant LAN, a fighting-game ring, a retro arcade and a creator bazaar would spawn in one place, block the last weekend of October. The digital festival rolls back into Hyderabad, co-located with a pop-culture juggernaut, and the mashup is perfect. Gamers get endless seats and side events, cosplay roams the aisles, and creators anchor meet-and-greets that feel like a roster dump of your sub feed. It runs October 31 to November 2 at the city’s exhibition hub, which means clean metro access and enough food stalls to keep squads alive.
The BYOD zone is the heartbeat. Bring your rig, your laptop, your handheld, or just roll in with a pad and make friends. Seventy-two hours of uninterrupted play means speed-running all the builds you have been ignoring, grinding that ranked ladder with your stack, or entering on-the-spot minis for game keys and bragging rights. Pack a power strip, a long Ethernet cable, and a hoodie. The air-con is strong and the night shifts are the best timeline for surprise scrims.
Fighting-game heads get their own coliseum. Expect brackets across the usual suspects with pop-off energy and TOs who actually run a tight ship. If you are new, this is the place to learn that locals still matter in 2025 and that lab monsters are the nicest people until the round starts. Retro and tabletop zones provide palette cleansers. One hour of pixel nostalgia, one intense round of a social deduction board game, and your brain resets for another block of queues.
Creators are the real crossover glue here. Meet-and-greets reward early birds, and panel slots tend to fill fast. If you want signatures or selfies, pick your top three and commit, because the floor is a labyrinth once the afternoon crowd peaks. The merch pit is better this year too. Independent artists are bringing prints, keycaps, and enamel pins, which means you can upgrade a setup without bankrupting yourself at a peripheral booth.
Cosplay adds a moving photo op every ten steps. Be polite, ask before you shoot, and let folks breathe—helmets and heavy props get brutal by late afternoon. If you have never cosplayed, this is a low-pressure place to try. Bring comfortable shoes and a small repair kit. There is always one strap that betrays you.
Food and logistics. Lines spike between two and four, so shift lunch to odd hours. Hydrate, and for the love of your squad do not skip sleep if you are playing in morning brackets. If you are chasing creator panels and LAN finals, plan your day with a map. Your steps counter will hit absurd numbers if you zigzag blindly.
If you are not from the city, stack evenings with local eats and a quick night view run. The metro dumps you back near the venue cleanly the next morning. Hotels near the exhibition cluster sell out fast, so grab rooms now and split with friends. It turns the weekend into a micro-convention with lobby scrims and lobby bragging.
The vibe every year is the same and it never gets old. A lot of noise, a lot of laughter, and the kind of shoulder-to-shoulder hype you cannot fake online. If you care about games, fandom or both, this is the capstone weekend of the month.
Follow Gaming Moves on Instagram and Facebook for floor maps, bracket times, and last-minute ticket drops you do not want to miss.
