Like Glastonbury and Primavera for music lovers, huge video game conventions have traditionally been a beloved gathering place for gamers, and a focal point of the year for gaming news.
At events such as E3 in Los Angeles and gamescom in Germany, hundreds of thousands of fans would turn up to play forthcoming games in cavernous halls full of light and sound. But where music festivals have roared back since the Covid pandemic, video game conventions have struggled to regain their former essential place in the calendar.
Last year’s gamescom in Cologne, the first in-person event since 2019, welcomed significantly fewer attenders: 265,000, down from a peak of 373,000. E3 in Los Angeles has been a fixture of the gaming calendar since 1995, but this year’s comeback event was cancelled just weeks before it was due to take place due to a lack of support from exhibitors. The London event EGX has shrunk from several halls of the ExCel Centre to just one in 2022. People are less keen to mingle in huge crowds, and video game developers and publishers are asking themselves what benefit they get from exhibiting at real-world events.
“For the game industry, in-person events had been losing importance for years, at least for marketers who realised that beaming their pitches through a screen directly to potential consumers was more efficient – and cheaper – than paying for an expensive booth and having to deal with the media’s pesky penchant for filtering or contextualising their message,” says Stephen Totilo, a longtime gaming journalist and gaming editor at Axios. “Once you miss one show, missing the rest is all the easier.”
Nevertheless, gamescom’s organisers have high expectations for this year’s event, which opens to the public on Thursday after a livestreamed opening ceremony on Tuesday night and a business day on Wednesday. According to its director, Tim Endres, gamescom is expecting more than 1,120 exhibitors, a record.
“It’s really a shame what happened to E3, but this year we are seeing records,” he says. “We were able to build relevant digital platforms during the pandemic – we took place every year – and this was really important for getting back to business after the pandemic … Broadly speaking, the role of game conventions is still the same as before. It’s about bringing together the whole community.”
Instead of using massive events to announce games and consoles, companies are shifting towards using them for community outreach, a place to nurture the thousands of micro-communities that form around individual games. It’s no longer just about building hype for forthcoming releases, but making a connection with fans.
Graeme Struthers, of game publisher Devolver Digital, a veteran of of trade shows over several decades, believes that they still have value for developers. “When you see people pick up controllers and start playing the build of the game that you’re showing, you get to see their reactions, and it’s a really, really powerful injection of energy,” he says.
“This is people taking four days to go and see games and meet people from their communities. It’s almost similar to going to Glastonbury, where it’s not just the bands you’re going to see, it’s the fans of those bands going to hang out.”
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The festival feel differentiates gamescom from more business-oriented games conventions – a mini-music festival runs concurrently across the Cologne, and it has separate areas and programmes of events for cosplayers, streamers, competitive esports fans, retro gamers and other subsections of gaming culture.
Just as they have been since the days of the arcade, video games are often experienced communally and socially, as often as they are experienced alone in front of a screen. Gamescom’s organisers, and those of events like it, are relying on the fact that people still want to come together to enjoy their passions in person.
“We have the whole gaming ecosystem at gamescom, from developers, publishers and trade to consumers and content creators,” says Endres. “Fans love being able to enjoy their passion with like-minded people … For many of our visitors, it’s simply the best time of the year.”