Gamescom 2024: a record-breaking year for the world's largest games event

Gamescom 2024, held from August 20th to 24th, once again affirmed its status as the world's premier gaming event. The event attracted a staggering 335,000 visitors from around 120 countries to Cologne, reflecting the increasingly globalized nature of the games industry. As well as the vast consumer show, Gamescom also welcomed over 32,000 trade visitors this year and featured close to 1,500 exhibitors from 64 countries, with 48 national pavilions showcasing the international diversity of the gaming ecosystem.

Devcom, Gamescom's sister event focused on the developer community, also hit new heights, with 5,000 visitors, representing over 1,600 companies from 83 countries. This was a 45% increase compared to 2023. Meanwhile, Gamescom boasted a record-breaking online engagement, particularly with its Opening Night Live, which garnered over 40 million video views – double the number from the previous year.

The growth of the show has been greatly assisted by the increasing presence of a wider range of global companies. Whereas in the past, most of the interest in the show was driven by traditional Western and Japanese publishers, these days Chinese and Korean companies like Mihoyo, Kingsoft, and Krafton provide some of the biggest attractions on the show floor. The increased prominence of emerging players from regions like China, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia is signaling a shift in industry dynamics.

Global publishers take the lead

The increasing presence of these new players has been particularly crucial in light of the decreasing focus on physical events by many of the industry's traditional giants. Both Sony and Nintendo opted to skip Gamescom this year, with Microsoft the only platform holder opting to invest in a large presence on the expo floor.

In many ways, however, this was a sign of the increasingly divergent strategy being pursued by Xbox compared to the other two console platforms. The most striking aspect of Xbox's vast booth was the presence of numerous third-party games. Titles from Ubisoft, Epic Games, and Mihoyo were prominently featured, with no distinction drawn between first-party and third-party-games—a physical representation of Xbox's content-first strategy, which was further emphasized by the announcement that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will be released on PlayStation 5 a few months after its Xbox launch later this year.

These moves are part of a steady shift from a hardware-centric approach to a broader focus on establishing Xbox as a leading games publisher. This is a move that feels very much in keeping with the content-first focus of Gamescom which has been enthusiastically embraced by Korean and Chinese publishers who have now firmly taken their place as leading draws for Gamescom visitors. This year's event saw Tencent-owned Funcom reveal Dune: Awakening, an open-world survival game based on the Dune books and movies, and NetEase showcased Marvel Rivals, a multiplayer shooter leveraging Marvel's popular IP. Meanwhile forthcoming Korean releases The First Berserker: Khazan and Mecha BREAK attracted large crowds despite having no existing IP to lean on.

Chinese games companies are increasingly focused on international expansion, driven in part by the uncertain regulatory environment at home. Unpredictable game approval processes and strict limits on playtime for younger players are major sources of volatility. To navigate these challenges, Chinese studios are pursuing a strategy of hedging against domestic uncertainty by marketing their games overseas and investing in and acquiring Western developers.

A more recent development is the direct launch of new titles by Chinese developers in international markets. However, this strategy comes with significant challenges, as localization requires more than just language translation. Adapting game design, user interfaces, and monetization strategies to suit Western tastes is crucial. While mobile gaming dominates in China, Western markets have a stronger focus on PC and console, further complicating these companies' global ambitions.

A prime example of Chinese games making waves internationally is Black Myth: Wukong, which was first showcased at Gamescom last year. The game generated significant buzz, with visitors waiting up to five hours to try the demo. Released during the week of Gamescom 2024, it quickly became the second-most popular title ever on Steam, reaching 2.1 million concurrent players on its launch date. Although Steam data indicates that most players are based in China, the game's global appeal is undeniable, marking a significant milestone in the international success of Chinese-developed games.

AI becomes increasingly visible

Many of these same players are also at the forefront of one of the biggest trends visible at Gamescom this year: the growing adoption of AI. While controversies around copyright, job replacement, and other issues has led most Western developers to take a cautious stance towards AI, it's increasingly clear that Asian companies are pursuing more aggressive experimentation with a variety of AI technologies.

Nvidia used the event to showcase its ACE "digital human" technology which has been used by Chinese developer Perfect World and Korea's Seasun to create player-facing conversational AI agents. Perfect World's implementation—which is just a tech demo for now—featured a fully-animated 3D character called Yun Ni capable of engaging in fairly complex conversation in English or Chinese and reading visual cues via webcam. However, the cloud-based model based on Open AI's GPT-4o introduced a large amount of latency, which together with Yun Ni's rather wooden delivery made anything approaching natural dialog impossible.

Another ACE demo featured a live production game, Seasun's Mecha BREAK, which is set for release in 2025 and was one of the biggest attractions on the show floor this year. In Mecha BREAK, the AI model runs locally rather than from the cloud. But while this alleviates latency issues, it means relying on a significantly less powerful language model which is noticeably less accurate in understanding inputs and less able to offer relevant and naturalistic answers.

Given these limitations, Seasun has positioned its AI-powered character as an in-game assistant—more a replacement for wiki pages than a full-blown character. A similar implementation is being used in Krafton's Inzoi, where the game's cat mascot leverages AI to answer player queries. Ultimately, this is a fairly limited first step towards conversational AI agents which will provide some novelty and perhaps a modicum of convenience but is clearly far short of revolutionary. It's notable too that the limiting factor in the above cases towards fuller application of player-facing AI is the capacity of the technology itself rather than the willingness of developers to leverage it. Krafton and Seasun are pushing the tech as far as it will go right now and the results at this point are not that exciting.

Instead, it's far more likely that a bigger impact will be seen on game production rather than eye-catching live in-game implementations. A recent high-profile example is the use of AI voicework in The Finals. Embark Studios (which is majority-owned by South Korea's Nexon) controversially used AI to generate in-game voiceovers, but the AI-generated lines are pre-recorded, not generated on the fly. Whatever the ethics of this approach, it does have the major upsides of there being no need for the game to share resources with an AI model and ensuring the developers have full control over the in-game content.

Though most companies are opting for a low-profile approach to their AI experiments, there is no doubt that the use of various forms of AI in game development is spreading rapidly. There were several AI tool startups visible in the B2B area of the show like Scenario (asset generation) and X&Immersion (voice and dialogue)—just two of more than 100 companies offering AI tools for game development tracked in Omdia's latest Games Tech Market Landscape.

As a combined consumer and trade event, Gamescom's ability to crystalize a wide variety of trends from the globalization of the publishing landscape, to the growth and limits of AI at a single event is a key element of its continued success. While it may host fewer blockbuster announcements than the expos of the past, the show's value to the industry is in many ways greater than ever.