🎪 Gamescom 2026: First Time Behind the Booth

September 6, 2026

I have been to Gamescom a few times as a visitor, which mostly means queueing. This year I had an exhibitor badge. I went to Cologne with the Midain Studios team to show Scarlet O'Beetle and the Unseen World, the game I do shader and rendering work on as a contractor. We had a small booth in the Romanian pavilion, and I did not know what to expect from the other side of the counter.

The Booth

Our booth was not big: one screen with the game running, the poster, a counter, and more ivy than strictly necessary. People kept stopping anyway, and almost all of them opened with some version of "so what is this?", which is fair when the first thing you see is a ladybug in armor.

So we explained it, over and over, and it went down well. I cannot point to one standout moment. It was more the steady stream of people who leaned in at the art and stayed for the pitch. At some point I noticed I had dropped the sentences nobody reacted to and kept the ones that got a nod, so the booth doubled as a way to test the pitch on a few hundred strangers.

The Business Area

The badge was the real reason to be there. The business area is quieter than the public halls and everybody in it is there to talk.

Most of my conversations were with people in roughly my situation, other indie developers and freelancers with a project on the go and no clear idea yet how to make it pay. Those were easy conversations because we all have the same problems.

Two meetings were about funding. One with Games BW, the games branch of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, the other with the DLR project management agency that runs the federal games funding program. I had a fuzzy idea that these programs exist and assumed they are not for a one-person studio. Both told me, in some detail, at which point they are. I left with a page of notes.

The conversation I keep coming back to was with a co-founder of Keen Games. They ship Enshrouded on their own engine, and he was open about what that looks like day to day and what it takes to keep a custom tech stack alive under a live game. I have a small Vulkan engine of my own, mostly because I enjoy it, so hearing how that decision plays out at a real studio was the best hour of the week.

I also talked to ArenaNet about Guild Wars 3. Nothing I can repeat here, but it was a good chat.

The Public Halls

Whenever someone else had the booth, I went out into the public halls. HoYoverse had the most elaborate setup of the show again, and I got to play Path of Exile at the Grinding Gear Games booth, in a hall with several thousand other people.

The place I spent the most time was the Indie Arena Booth. Dozens of indie games in one area, some finished, some obviously still a year out, and next to each one a developer who was happy to talk. I played a lot and asked a lot of questions. After a few days behind my own counter I had more sympathy for the people behind theirs, and I think I asked better questions because of it.

Takeaways

The booth was fun, but the badge was the point. I underestimated how much happens in the business area and spent the first two days figuring that out instead of having meetings booked. Next time I write to people before the show.

The funding talks changed my plans more than anything else. I had filed "apply for funding" under things to look into eventually, and now it has a date on it.

And the Keen Games conversation stuck with me for a different reason. I like building my own engine, but hearing what it costs to keep one alive under a shipped game made me a lot more relaxed about mine being a hobby project.

See you in Cologne next year, hopefully with a booth of my own.