254.000 visitors went to participate in this year´s gamescom in Cologne. Among them 18.900 trade visitors and 4.400 international journalists from almost 50 countries. They came to witness Europe´s biggest game event which featured content from 550 international exhibitors. gamescom by far has become Europe´s most important event for games. The next event will be taking place 17th - 21st of August 2011.
A personal impression
by Peter C. Krell
"Only few people from Asia joined this year´s Gamescom. The event which is taking place annually in August at the Messe Center in Cologne, Germany, is becoming more and more a melting point for the European games industry. This year for the first time, since the GCO was a disaster, a lot of European online game companies decided to attend Gamescom with an own booth in the B2B section. Some also decided to aim directly for consumers by operating huge stands in one of the consumer halls. Even though the event was fairly crowded in both areas, there is a huge potential for growth. Chances are that the Köln Messe GmbH does not realize that only few Asian companies were represented with an own booth to call this an international event. If companies like NC soft, Nexon, NHN, CJ Internet, Tencent, The9 and the like decided to join Gamescom Köln Messe GmbH might need build a few more halls to cover the demand. One will see if there is going to be a successor event of GCO or if the online game industry is going to decide to be happy with Gamescom from now on. Certainly all the main channel partners of Asian online game publishers like Gamigo, Gameforge, Frogster and the like were present at Gamescom already. Some of them might show more engagement in the consumer hall in the future. But will this be enough to reach out to a European audience?
Like Richard van Barneveld, CEO of GEE, pointed out that more and more companies are aiming at the convenience of players. Few of them in the future are going to like to download anything any more. This development will after his precast boost his joint effort with Kalydo, also a Dutch company, to deliver all MMOs into the browser by making use of a new grid technology Kalydo is currently offering: www.kalydo.com
This might change several things in the market which already sees Korean new developers like John Lee building their new games with MMO technology like Trinigy from Germany and aiming to bring them directly to the browser.
It´s arguable if the download client online games are going to fade away in the near term. Due to the on going browser hype which in Europe is also being nurtured by download lazy users and still missing bandwidth at the same time, this might turn out to be a European phenomenon. With companies like Gaikai and Onlive annoucing their arrival on the European market in 2011 the two existing business models of download client vs browser might be threatened by a new development. In the meanwhile Gameforge announces to have 60 Mio. users after saying "good-bye" to Klaas Kersting, Gameforge´s former CEO, who was the original founder of Gameforge. The question is how long the hype will continue to carry on. After having bought 60% of the available stock of Frogster, Gameforge seems to be expanding just like Bigpoint. Without enough seats on the Frogster board though this acquisition might either turn out to become a nightmare or a high quality cooperation under the former Frogster leader´s lead. Let´s hope the sourcing managers will stay on board so that Frogster will be able to sign more nice games from territories from Korea and China.
Just like Nils Henning, CCO at Bigpoint, the other big German browser company continues to expand their portofolio by adding on MMO licence after the other to their existing repertoire of already published MMOs and browser games. This trend is going to continue. After NBC´s acquisition of Bigpoint the growth strategy seems to be clear. Bigpoint has many users and Bigpoint needs to entertain them in order to stay on the competitive edge with other big online publishers like Gameforge for instance. At the same time, Bigpoint is continuing to win one European game award after the other, possibly because everybody is doing the same and Bigpoint is quiet good at this.
Innogames is another fairly fresh browser games company from Hamburg. They are ready to hire more than 100 people within the next few months. Their focus is browser games and like Trivian they have recently been fairly successful recently in publishing thier games through the browser. The game rise to a few more new companies which are going to operate from Berlin in the near term. Among them: Capital Games.
One will see how the three fold games industry will continue to serve their customers desires. Will they support client based online games, will they play in the browser only or on private closed garden networks like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are already offering? Will the Gaikai and the Onlive environments be similar to the later and will the adoption process to get MMOs grid ready be the next bottle neck? Stay tuned for more information! "
Link to the gamescom website:
http://www.gamescom-cologne.com/en/gamescom/home/index.php
