The premier european games consumer and trade show returned last week with the second edition – between 18th and 22nd in Cologne, Germany. The first day was only for business to business meetings and from 19th it was also open to regular visitors.

More than 254,000 visitors attended Gamescom 2010 and 18,900 were trade visitors. 505 exhibitors presented their last accomplishments coming from 33 countries. The show included more than 200 world, European and German premieres. In parallel it was organized Gamescom Festival which turned the centre of Cologne into an interactive playground with more than 100,000 visitors.

Volkswagen was one of the important sponsors of the Gamescom Festival decorating cars with gaming subjects and allowing plasmas in the trucks for people to play console games on them.

Gamescom event was promoted consistently using the following channels: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Xing, Youtube and Linkedin.

After discussing with at least 50 people from different companies and visiting all the stands from the business area I extracted the most important trends of the show:

1. The continuous development of the high tech titles and the well known franchises like: Spiderman, World of Warcraft, Startcraft, DJ Hero, Guitar Hero, Star Wars and others;

2. The social media presence of new games is increased as much as possible; everybody wants a share of social media marketing results;

3. Many publishers will launch the same titles both in retail and downloadable format; they say that the people will continue to buy games from shops but the price difference for the downloadable copies will bring new audiences;

4. Social media games is a term which could be heard in every corner of the exhibition;

5. Almost all the new online games are browser games, where the users doesn’t have to install anything on the pc;

6. The monetization of games and all online activities became very important as many payment processing companies exhibited at the show offering integrated solutions;

7. The return of interest in casual games for PC and other platforms;

8. Distributors like the Swedish company Gameoutlet added new business lines by founding the publishing company Nordin Games;

9. FESPA just added the counting on digital downloads from some of the big publishers to its data aggregated for UK charts;

10. Many new players in online games and social media games claimed to crossing the 1 million users and counting;

People love games and this industry proved to be a recession proof one. There are casualties on the way but the general feeling is that Q4 2010 will be an excellent one.

Adrian Niculescu

Social Media Strategist

www.clubv3.com

www.mushbloom.com