Gamescom 2024: Ready Player Two? An Industry Looks to the Future
New titles, trends, and technologies were on show at Cologne’s Gamescom 2024, now the world’s largest video games fair.
Gamescom bills itself as the world’s largest games fair. Now in its 15th year, it is capitalizing on the closure of E3, and for this edition over 1400 participants from 64 countries descended on Cologne’s Koelnmesse. Its general admission policy means that it hosted over 335,000 visitors (about 10% of whom are trade). That total is three times the number that attended MWC Barcelona. The show recorded a record 310m digital engagements, including over 40m for the Gamescom Opening Night Live alone.
Its sister event Devcom, which targets the games developer community, grew as well. More than 5000 participants attended the Devcom conference, up 45% over the previous year. This now makes it the second largest global developer event after the massive Game Developers Conference held every year in San Francisco.
Many of the Gamescom visitors were there to see the latest and greatest games. There was certainly a mix of new announcements and gameplay reveals that kept the large crowds happy, with the likes of Borderlands 4, Civilization VII, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Marvel Rivals, and Dune: Awakening stealing headlines.
My analysis of the event is below. Companies mentioned include: Amazon, Apple, Deutsche Telekom, EE, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Nintendo, Nvidia, and Sony.