German website Games Wirtschaft contacted Sony to ask about their Gamescom 2022 plans and it turns out they do not have any – Sony will be not be at Gamescom 2022, joining the likes of Nintendo, Activision Blizzard and Take-Two in skipping the show.
Gamescom 2022 will be an in-person event running from 24th to 28th August in Cologne, Germany, and there’s already some big plans for the show’s return. The ever present Geoff Keighley will be on hand to present the Gamescom Opening Night Live showcase on August 23rd, leading into the public and press event at the huge Koelnmesse conference centre, as well as featuring a simultaneous online event.
But there’s obviously still plenty of wariness about holding large scale in-person events, given that there’s still a whole panedmic going on. Gamescom’s organisers have been able to claim that over 250 companies will attend the 2022 return of the show, but there’s only a handful of major publishers that have publicly backed it. Amongst them are Bandai Namco, THQ Nordic and Koch Media. There’s also rumours that Xbox will attend, though this has not yet been confirmed.
Sony has usually put on quite a strong showing at Gamescom, taking up almost half of one of the Koelnmesse huge halls, but two years of a pandemic has shown that the industry simply doesn’t really need large in-person events anymore. More and more publishers are moving to running their own shows, multiple times a year online.
This years E3 was also cancelled and instead was replaced by a number of online events from various groups including Geoff Keighley’s Summer Games Fest. Over here in the UK we still have EGX 2022 to look forward to but that rarely includes game announcements and is more focussed on the consumers at the event.
One part of the problem, per VGC, is that companies aren’t diverting the resources to create playable demos of their games at the moment. This was typically a major part of preparing for a big open floor show at E3, with developers having to create splashy new trailers for the big press conferences, and then back it up with something decent and polished enough to show to press and/or the general public. Coming just a couple months later, Gamescom would often see developers and publishers roll out the same demos for a different audience, so if there’s no E3 demos ready, there’s nothing to quickly turn around for Gamescom either.
Still, there could be plenty to see at Gamescom in August, depending on who you are. The public have access to some parts of the conference centre, but there’s also dedicated space for business and press to hold meetings and smaller sessions with press and developers.
Source: Games Wirtschaft, VGC
