Packed exhibition halls in Cologne are a given at Gamescom these days. People's leisure habits in Germany have changed markedly over the past ten years and become increasingly digital.
Today, 33 percent of respondents in the latest so-called "Leisure Monitor" say they play video games at least once a week. Only smartphone activities and listening to music have seen even stronger growth.
This year's Gamescom, which was expected to attract more than 350,000 visitors, is being held under the slogan "Games whet the appetite for the future." Henna Virkkunen, vice-president of the European Commission responsible for digital technologies, is also coming to Cologne to talk about the European Union's strategy on games. The EU commissioner will meet Vice-Chancellor Lars Klingbeil, Research Minister Dorothee Bar and North Rhine-Westphalia state premier Hendrik Wust.
Today, Frank-Walter Steinmeier will become the first German president ever to visit Gamescom, where he will open the Gamescom congress.
According to the 2026 annual report on Germany's games industry, revenue from games, games hardware and online gaming services in Germany reached around €9.4 billion in 2025. That represents growth of 4 percent compared with the previous year. This makes Germany the largest games market in Europe and the fifth-largest worldwide.
Industry representatives in Germany are correspondingly confident: “As the world’s biggest games event, Gamescom is once again making one thing abundantly clear this year: we need to make far better use of the unique potential of games and their cultural, economic and technological power. It must be Germany’s and Europe’s ambition to play a leading role as a production hub for games,” said Game managing director Felix Falk ahead of the trade fair.
“To achieve that, we need more ambition, reliable political framework conditions, proportionate regulation, and to tap much more into the unique potential of games for our society.”
Yet in the first half of 2026, industry revenue fell by 3 percent to €4.2 billion, mainly because hardware sales dropped by 8 percent. Almost all consoles, such as Nintendo's Switch, Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation, have become more expensive in recent months because of rising prices for memory and hard drives. Europe is now banking on building up its own chip production in order to become less dependent on China.
At the opening event in Cologne, Canadian video game expert and host Geoff Keighley described the changes in the industry as "exciting on the one hand and alarming on the other". He said data centres for artificial intelligence (AI) needed huge numbers of chips, which had squeezed supply and driven up the cost of gaming technology.
New releases at Gamescom include action titles such as "Nodus Fall", in which the hero fights dragons, "Rainbow Six: Tactics" featuring the military strategy of an elite soldier, another instalment in Russian bestselling author Dmitry Glukhovsky's game series, "Metro 2039", as well as the fantasy epic "Game of Thrones: War for Westeros".
One of Germany's best-known gaming companies is Giants Software. The brand with the cow on the cover is now celebrating five million copies sold of "Farming Simulator 25", a farming simulation game released at the end of 2024. At Gamescom, Giants Software is presenting the interactive premiere of "Farming Simulator 25: Beans & Alpacas", which is due out in October.
