Gamescom 2024, held from 20 to 24 August, once again confirmed its status as the world’s leading gaming event. The event attracted a staggering 335,000 visitors from around 120 countries to Cologne, reflecting the increasingly globalised nature of the gaming industry. In addition to the extensive consumer exposure, Gamescom also welcomed over 32,000 trade visitors this year and hosted around 1,500 exhibitors from 64 countries, with 48 country pavilions showcasing the international diversity of the gaming ecosystem.
Gamescom’s sister event focused on the developer community, Devcom, also reached 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 record-breaking online engagement, most notably with its Opening Night Live, which garnered over 40 million video views, double the previous year.
The fair’s growth has been greatly aided by the growing presence of a wider range of global companies. While in the past most of the interest in the fair was driven by traditional Western and Japanese publishers, these days Chinese and Korean companies such as Mihoyo, Kingsoft and Krafton provide some of the biggest draws on the fair floor. The growing importance of emerging players from regions such as China, South Korea and Saudi Arabia is signaling a shift in industry dynamics.
Global publishers take the lead
The growing presence of these new players has been especially crucial given the diminished focus on physical events by many of the industry’s traditional giants. Both Sony and Nintendo have chosen to skip Gamescom this year, with Microsoft being the only platform holder that has chosen to invest in a large exhibitor presence.
In many ways, however, this was a sign of the increasingly divergent strategy that Xbox is pursuing 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 made between first-party and third-party games, a physical representation of Xbox's content-first strategy, further underscored 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 major games publisher. It's a move that feels very much in line with Gamescom's focus on content, which has been met with enthusiasm by Korean and Chinese publishers who have now firmly established themselves as the main draws for Gamescom visitors. This year's event featured Tencent-owned Funcom Dune: Awakeningan open-world survival game based on Dune books and movies, and NetEase has presented Marvel Rivalsa multiplayer shooter that leverages the popular Marvel IP. Meanwhile, upcoming Korean releases The First Berserker: Khazan AND Mecha BREAK It drew huge crowds despite having no existing intellectual property to back it up.
Chinese game companies are increasingly focused on international expansion, partly due to the uncertain domestic regulatory environment. Unpredictable game approval processes and strict limits on playtime for younger players are major sources of volatility. To overcome 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 presents significant challenges, as localization requires more than simple language translation. Adapting game design, user interfaces, and monetization strategies to suit Western tastes is crucial. While mobile gaming dominates in China, Western markets are increasingly focused on PC and consoles, further complicating these companies’ global ambitions.
A prime example of Chinese games that are making waves internationally is Black Myth: Wukongfirst debuted at Gamescom last year. The game generated a huge buzz, with attendees waiting up to five hours to try out the demo. Released during Gamescom 2024 week, it quickly became the second most popular title ever on Steam, reaching 2.1 million concurrent players at launch. While Steam data indicates that the majority of players are in China, the game’s global appeal is undeniable, marking a significant milestone in the international success of Chinese-developed games.
Artificial Intelligence Becomes More and More 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 copyright disputes, job displacement, and other issues have led most Western developers to take a cautious stance on 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 Chinese developer Perfect World and South Korea’s Seasun are using to create conversational AI agents aimed at players. Perfect World’s implementation, which is still just a tech demo, featured a fully animated 3D character named Yun Ni who could engage in fairly complex conversations in English or Chinese and read visual cues via a webcam. However, Open AI’s cloud-based GPT-4o model introduced a large amount of latency, which combined with Yun Ni’s somewhat wooden delivery made any dialogue that came close to natural dialogue impossible.
Another ACE demo featured a live production game, Seasun's Mecha BREAKwhich is scheduled for release in 2025 and was one of the main attractions of the fair this year. In Mecha BREAKthe 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 that is significantly less accurate at understanding input and less able to provide relevant, naturalistic responses.
Given these limitations, Seasun has positioned its AI character as a game assistant, more of a replacement for wiki pages than a fully-fledged character. A similar implementation is used in Krafton's Inzoiwhere the game's mascot, the cat, uses AI to answer player questions. Ultimately, this is a rather limited first step towards conversational AI agents that will provide some novelty and perhaps a modicum of convenience, but is clearly far from revolutionary. It's also notable that the limiting factor in the above cases towards a more complete application of player-facing is the capability of the technology itself rather than the willingness of developers to exploit it. Krafton and Seasun are pushing the technology as far as they can go right now and the results at this point aren't all that exciting.
Instead, we're much more likely to see a bigger impact on game production than on engaging live in-game implementations. A recent high-profile example is the use of AI voicework in The finals. Embark Studios (majority-owned by South Korea’s Nexon) has 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 has the key benefits of not having to share resources with an AI model and giving developers full control over the game’s content.
While most companies are opting for a low-key approach, [GJ1] [LD2] their AI experiments, there is no doubt that the use of various forms of AI in game development is rapidly spreading. There were several AI tool startups visible in the B2B area of the show such as Scenario (asset generation) and X&Immersion (voice and dialogue), just two of the more than 100 companies offering AI tools for game development tracked in the last Video Game Technology Market Overview.
As a combined consumer and trade event, Gamescom’s ability to crystallize a wide variety of trends, from the globalization of the publishing landscape to the growth and limits of AI, in a single event is a key element of its continued success. While it may host fewer blockbuster announcements than expos of the past, the show’s value to the industry is in many ways greater than ever before.