Hamburg is marking its 20th anniversary this year with a series of celebrations. The party was kicked off back in March with the Hamburg Games Conference: Two days of panel discussions, presentations and talks, with 50 speakers holding court to more than 500 attendees from across Germany and beyond. Among the highlights was a post-mortem of the indie strategy hit Battle Brothers from Hamburg studio Overhype, which is estimated to have pulled in $10 million in revenue on PC alone (releasing for Switch in 2021 and PlayStation and Xbox last year). A more extensive retrospective was held in April,
at Hamburg’s historic City Hall, where 200 guests were invited to celebrate 20 years of Gamecity Hamburg’s advocacy. Closing the evening was a lively panel discussion featuring, among other Hamburg games industry luminaries, the founder and CEO of Rockfish Games Michael Schade, who you may notice elsewhere in this issue. Then in May, something of a more traditional
celebration at Hamburg’s rather iconic creative hub, Jupiter, where more than 250 industry professionals gathered for what appears to have been something akin to our very own IRL event – although perhaps with rather a nicer view of the surrounding area than Waterloo’s Leake Street allows.
LIFTED Next up for Hamburg’s game development community is of course gamescom, where the brightest and best games will be showcased as part of Gamecity’s Indie Arena booth. As in previous years, five studios will have the opportunity to showcase their efforts for free as part of its ‘Road to gamescom’ program, which this year includes such promising titles as Misgiven from Symmetry Break Studio and Light of Atlantis from DrownTown, a team made of former students of Hamburg University and winners of the “Best Prototype” newcomer award at this year’s German Computer Games Awards. Many of this year’s Road to gamescom
recipients have benefited from Gamecity Hamburg’s Games Lift Incubator, which this year has been awarded to five debut teams. Each team will receive a full year of support, including workshops and a mentoring program with renowned international experts, as well as access to a shared studio space with the other
participating teams. There’s 15,000 euros in financial funding and priceless access to more than 30 experts in game design, product development, pitching, business development, press relations and marketing from the Games Lift Network. Not a bad deal.
CITY LIFE But enough about Gamecity, what about Hamburg itself? Is it the epicentre of German game development the numbers working there would suggest? How integrated is business, development and education? What’s the infrastructure like? Hell, is it a nice city to live in? To help us answer some of these questions we turned to three local studios: Bigpoint, best known for its browser-based MMOs, Bytro Labs for its PC and mobile strategy games, and to InnoGames, which has a broad range of free-to- play titles across mobile and online. Here’s what they had to say about their home...
The brothers behind Battle Brothers reveal the secrets of their success at this year’s Hamburg Games Conference
Business networking at the Hamburg Games Conference
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