Gamescom: What Actually Happens

Let’s talk about Gamescom! Normally when someone in my line of work goes there, it’s to do a sponsored livestream, or something to that effect. That’s not the case for me!

Hmm, what could this be?

Gamescom: A Dev Perspective

Going to Gamescom as a developer can mean a few different things depending on what stage your company & projects are at. Many will be demoing to the public in the main halls, but many more will be spending time in the business area. 

This all goes down in a few halls that aren’t accessible to the public. It’s formatted just like your usual type of industry trade show, being packed with booths. These booths will vary greatly in size & purpose. I’ll cover the indie side of things first!

Indies usually travel to events like these in regional groups, sponsored by their local trade body. For example, Sweden will have a booth, and that’s where Swedish indies will hang out. For us, we’re going under the Northern Ireland delegation, as a part of UKIE - the United Kingdom’s game industry trade body. UKIE has a fairly large booth with dozens of tables & demo pods. Northern Ireland has a few of those to it’s self.

Getting to an event like this usually requires having a good relationship with your local trade body. I’m going along with Thomas, my co-founder. His ticked is 50% covered by NI Screen, while the business is covering mine. As a part of this, we get access to the NI Screen tables & networking dinner.

What does this actually mean for us? Well we can take meetings at our space. Some publishers will have people running around to take such meetings, others may just have a smaller presence this year, and others will want us to come to them.

Being honest, that’s most of Gamescom - it’s running around various booths taking meetings with publisher. How do you secure those meetings? Well there’s a paid meeting platform called MeetToMatch where you can send people requests. That’s normally how you lock-in your meetings in advance - past that it’s all about what you can secure on the day, either through existing contacts or by visiting a booth and getting a foot in the door.

It’s not just publishers and developers though; there are also localisation companies, middleware companies and platform holders, such as ID&Xbox.

Past that, it’s all about tying to get into the right networking dinners & parties. You’d be surprised how much of the real work gets done in those events, plus in whatever hotel lobby people end up in afterwards. Since a simple conversation can end up leading to a 5 digit deal, it’s an extremely busy time. A lot of work is clustered into 4 days, forcing everyone to go hard. Being Germany, that means lots of beer...

Chances are I’ll be quite the corpse afterwards! 

Our Goals

We’re looking to get as many publishers interested in our current project. Typically, that means having a good meeting with their acquisitions person & then following up with a build of the game after the convention. We’re also interested in /some/ platform holders, particularly Game Pass, as they seem to have very fair terms, plus I like Microsoft’s rather open stance when it comes to the PC platform.

It isn’t make of break for us - regardless of how it goes, we’re going to continue development of our current project. The default plan has been to go via Kickstarter once we have sufficiently de-risked the project, though if we happen to find a good publishing partner, then that’s something that we’d also consider. Publishers get a bad wrap, but few appreciate how vital they are to marketing, localisation, QA and far more - the things that indies usually struggle with the most.