Salt Lake Gaming Con: Giant gaming convention planned in Salt Lake City

"Honestly, we [in Utah] haven't had something for super game geeks … as big as what we're planning," said Reason Robles, the event's creative director and marketing manager.

Williams is wooing major game developers to the inaugural convention, though he will announce those later. He and his team also are lining up personalities from the gaming world for some of the tournaments — which will be divided by skill level, so the less experienced can compete, too.

Williams and his team hope the convention will also be an opportunity for people to discover new games and bond with others in a world where it's easy to stay isolated.

"You see so many different people throughout the day that we never interact with," Williams said. "Gaming is a way to help bridge that, to get everybody together."

Tickets go on sale Wednesday, April 1, and start at $25 for a three-day pass. The price will increase as the event gets closer. Besides admission to the convention, the ticket price includes entry to weekend concerts and parties.

Concert and party promotion — with a side of DJing — is Williams' background, but he also has a big gaming credential. In 2013, he won a world championship tournament playing HeroClix, a popular table-top game that pits figurines of comic book, video game and movie characters against each other.

After claiming the title, Williams spent the next two years traveling to gaming conventions. Along the way, he thought about bringing a similar event to Salt Lake. He started collecting the best ideas from each convention — "what works, and what doesn't work" — and talking to other event organizers.

Gaming sales are huge, and not just in Utah. Video game sales for 2014 totaled more than $5 billion, according to CNET. And table-top game sales have enjoyed a recent resurgence. Industry sales jumped 20 percent from 2013 to 2014 nationwide, adding up to more than $700 million, according to gaming newsgroup ICv2.

Gaming Con isn't the first gaming convention along the Wasatch Front, but Williams hopes it fosters community rather than competition. He's partnered with Dale Gifford, who organizes the annual table-top gaming convention SaltCON. The older gaming event — which celebrated its eighth anniversary this year — will likely supply Gaming Con with some of its games and volunteers.

Gifford welcomes the new event that's "a different experience than any other Utah convention is currently offering," he said.

"We just want to bring the community together," Williams said. "We absolutely love to see SaltCON's numbers grow, and to see Fantasy Con's numbers grow, and Comic Con continue to sell out. We want everybody to do that, because we want to show that – you know what, this is like this amazing nerd mecca out here."

So far, people seem to be responding to the news. Within 12 hours of the Facebook page going live in early March, Gaming Con gained more than 1,000 fans, Robles said.

Organizers also have been giving away three-day passes through weekly Facebook promotions. A similar tactic paid dividends for Salt Lake Comic Con, whose social-media push and giveaways helped drive turnout to its inaugural event in 2013.

The rewards won't stop with social media, either. Williams' goal is to give away more than $100,000 in cash and prizes, such as gaming consoles, through the convention's tournaments.

Entry fees for some of those tournaments, and a portion of the overall ticket sales, will be donated to the Huntsman Cancer Foundation.