Game Republic spent an enjoyable (and beautifully sunny) few days in Cologne 18-21 August at Gamescom – now the biggest consumer and business event in the world – which also features the smaller dev business event Devcom.
Devcom featured an expo with major companies such as AWS and Meta, talks from the likes of Valve, Reddit and GSC Gameworld and dozens of roundtables and special presentations and discussions on topics ranging from leadership, AI, women-in-games, production schedules, investment and more. It was a great introduction to Cologne and is recommended for developers wanting more of a deep dive into the games industry zeitgeist – and apparently is already being planned for next year with a rebrand of “Gamescom Dev”.
Gamescom followed on the Wednesday 20th with an industry day – an opportunity to have meetings, check out stands, bump into friends and industry colleagues and also check out the consumer halls packed with huge stands for companies like Capcom, Konami, Nintendo and Xbox, before the 400,000 people descend on the Koelnmesse venue from Thursday.
Game Republic organised a roundtable session for GR members with Valve to discuss bringing games to Steam – and had a fantastic discussion about Wishlists, store pages, international languages for the platform (Simplified Chinese is now the No.1 language on Steam, with English second…) and the fact that Steam adds more than 100,000 new store buyers every DAY.
Jamie Sefton MD of Game Republic saw and spoke to many other GR members in Cologne there for business meetings including Red Kite Games, IMP Gaming, Cast Iron Games, Xsolla, Radical Forge, Exient, Team17, Other Things, ECI Games, KudosQA and Sumo Digital, with many meetings happening at the Ukie UK trade stand, and in hotels and meeting spaces around the Koelnmesse venue – as well as at the (in)famous Irish pub, the Corkonian in the evenings.
After the event Jamie commented on the event “As an alternative to GDC, Gamescom is a less expensive and equally valuable business event – and the addition of the huge consumer show, is useful for companies wanting to demonstrate their games or games-related products to the public.
Generally Devcom and Gamescom were positive – the games industry is still going through a tough period of readjustment, but there are signs this year, from GDC through Develop: Brighton and Gamescom, that business is picking up, more funding is available from publishers and investors and there are more opportunities for work-for-hire and co-development. There were numerous discussions about the use of generative AI – mostly from companies investigating if it can speed up the essential-but-dull administrative and organisational processes during development, not the use of AI for code or assets – and how important it was for companies to have an official internal policy on AI, whether they are using generative AI or not.
Some of the Devcom leadership discussions (these are just opinions expressed by various individuals working in games) were interesting too – that VC funding is mostly aimed towards exits rather than building companies; that children playing games now don’t care about production values (in games like Roblox) and they want to actively participate in creating experiences with friends; that the market will progress into niche markets, for more sustainable, smaller games as well as fewer AAA titles; that the games industry is still immature – it’s a creative industry but has a lot of poor leadership and needs more/better business people. All very interesting and thought-provoking.”
Check out our gallery of photos from the event below!
