Gamescome Impessions - Entertainment Area

Wholesale Games participated in Gamescome trade exhibition on 17 - 21 August 2011. Below is a brief summary article about our impressions from the show.

We have spent most of our time in the business area of the trade show, meeting with other companies. We just briefly visited the entertainment area of the show, which could be attributed with a few adjectives, overcrowded, busy, and a bit below expactions. It may seem large but it wasn't. It has occupied Halls 6 - 11 of Koln Messe exhibition centre, Halls 4 and 5 were for business section, and Halls 1 - 3 were not used for this trade show. Yet there were many empty spaces in some entertainment area halls, or large spaces devoted for some other activities, such as skating and cycling demonstration - seemingly not much to do with the video games. Though it may happen that they did something to do with video games but the lack of time did not allow us to explore and find out that connection.

The busy parts of the entertainment area had a lot of carton structures with quite large size with giant signs of game titles, such us World of Warcraft, Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, FIFA 12, etc. The carton structures look amazingly similar across titles, publishers, halls, and most of the time they look a little boring too. It didn't though prevent very large queues of enthusiastic gamers, who were waiting for their opportunity to enter inside the carton structures, sometimes for six hours, we've been told! What was happening inside the carton structure I cannot say since we did not have so much time to wait in the queue to enter. I suspect not much was happening there though, may be an opportunity to watch a pre-release trailer, which, let's be honest, can be easily watched on YouTube! So much about entertainment area, since our major focus and the main purpose of being at the show was the business area.

To be continued...