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Speaking to VGC at this year’s convention, head of Gamescom Christian Baur said the secret to the German show’s success is that its plans didn’t depend on those attendees returning at all.
“If you look around, you will see fewer and fewer of those booths with hundreds of game stations where people are expected to just engage with the games, but you can see a ton of booths that have a stage at the centre with a lot of video and live streaming equipment around it.
“And that’s basically their strategy, to use Gamescom as a stage to create content and then to expand that content out into the World Wide Web to reach gamers all over the place, and not only those who attend Gamescom.
“That’s something we want to facilitate and something we want to enhance, and that’s basically where I believe the future of events like Gamescom lies – to breach the barrier between what’s happening on-site and what’s happening digitally, and to make sure that what’s happening on-site can be accessed by everybody who’s interested in it.”
On the death of E3, Baur said its removal from the calendar presents a “huge challenge” for Gamescom, as it previously benefited from developers planning code for the US show and then bringing it over to Cologne a couple of months later. However, he claimed Gamescom’s pivot to digital and away from just hands-on experiences means this is less of an issue than it could’ve been.
“We can’t make our strategy dependent on E3, because E3 is unfortunately way too unreliable to do so,” he said. “We have to have our own strategy, we have to have our own vision, we have to have our own starting point, regardless of an E3 or a Summer Game Fest.
“Gamescom is Gamescom, and Gamescom is big.”
Do you think you’ve benefitted from some of the fatigue around digital events that ballooned during the pandemic?
Absolutely. I truly believe so. I don’t have KPIs to point to that conclusion but my gut feeling tells me that we definitely did, and I think Gamescom last year was the best example. We really struggled to put together a show – everything happened at a very late point in time, unlike in other years – but in the end the consumers really voted with their feet.
They proved that they want to come back here, and want to come to Gamescom, and want to be together in a physical event, and I think that’s partly because of the fatigue of digital events. We did not expect to have 265,000 people last year, that was beyond our expectations, and I’m very, very pleased that we had so many coming here and I’m glad that they trusted in our capabilities to put together a great show.
All that we do at Gamescom, we do very closely with the games industry. We have different boards, we have different interaction channels with the games industry. We’re trying, together with them, to create an experience for the players, and I’m glad that the players trusted in our ability – as an industry and as an event – to deliver them a unique experience.
You alluded to the challenge of putting a show on after the pandemic. Where are you at in terms of where you were pre-pandemic?
The thing is, 2019 was the last show we did before the pandemic, which was actually my first Gamescom in this role as director. Before that I was an exhibitor. But 2019 broke all records when it comes to Gamescom. It was an all-time high, we never had more visitors, we never had a larger reach, we never had more exhibitors or floor space rented out.
So it would have been very difficult to pick up from where we left off in 2019, regardless of whether there was a pandemic or not, because it’s always difficult to put something on top of an all-time record. Even though we had a good trajectory, it’s harder to grow the bigger you get.
Speaking to VGC at this year’s convention, head of Gamescom Christian Baur said the secret to the German show’s success is that its plans didn’t depend on those attendees returning at all.
“If you look around, you will see fewer and fewer of those booths with hundreds of game stations where people are expected to just engage with the games, but you can see a ton of booths that have a stage at the centre with a lot of video and live streaming equipment around it.
“And that’s basically their strategy, to use Gamescom as a stage to create content and then to expand that content out into the World Wide Web to reach gamers all over the place, and not only those who attend Gamescom.
“That’s something we want to facilitate and something we want to enhance, and that’s basically where I believe the future of events like Gamescom lies – to breach the barrier between what’s happening on-site and what’s happening digitally, and to make sure that what’s happening on-site can be accessed by everybody who’s interested in it.”
On the death of E3, Baur said its removal from the calendar presents a “huge challenge” for Gamescom, as it previously benefited from developers planning code for the US show and then bringing it over to Cologne a couple of months later. However, he claimed Gamescom’s pivot to digital and away from just hands-on experiences means this is less of an issue than it could’ve been.
“We can’t make our strategy dependent on E3, because E3 is unfortunately way too unreliable to do so,” he said. “We have to have our own strategy, we have to have our own vision, we have to have our own starting point, regardless of an E3 or a Summer Game Fest.
“Gamescom is Gamescom, and Gamescom is big.”
Do you think you’ve benefitted from some of the fatigue around digital events that ballooned during the pandemic?
Absolutely. I truly believe so. I don’t have KPIs to point to that conclusion but my gut feeling tells me that we definitely did, and I think Gamescom last year was the best example. We really struggled to put together a show – everything happened at a very late point in time, unlike in other years – but in the end the consumers really voted with their feet.
They proved that they want to come back here, and want to come to Gamescom, and want to be together in a physical event, and I think that’s partly because of the fatigue of digital events. We did not expect to have 265,000 people last year, that was beyond our expectations, and I’m very, very pleased that we had so many coming here and I’m glad that they trusted in our capabilities to put together a great show.
All that we do at Gamescom, we do very closely with the games industry. We have different boards, we have different interaction channels with the games industry. We’re trying, together with them, to create an experience for the players, and I’m glad that the players trusted in our ability – as an industry and as an event – to deliver them a unique experience.
You alluded to the challenge of putting a show on after the pandemic. Where are you at in terms of where you were pre-pandemic?
The thing is, 2019 was the last show we did before the pandemic, which was actually my first Gamescom in this role as director. Before that I was an exhibitor. But 2019 broke all records when it comes to Gamescom. It was an all-time high, we never had more visitors, we never had a larger reach, we never had more exhibitors or floor space rented out.
So it would have been very difficult to pick up from where we left off in 2019, regardless of whether there was a pandemic or not, because it’s always difficult to put something on top of an all-time record. Even though we had a good trajectory, it’s harder to grow the bigger you get.
