Gamescom’s digital audience grows by 30 per cent year-on-year

Gamescom has released headline figures on its weeklong digital outing for this year’s Gamescom. The overall audience was up by 30 per cent over last year’s digital outing, with 13m live viewers in total. 

A huge part of that success comes of course from the flagship Opening Night Live event, which saw similar gains. The event recorded 5.8m live viewers across its running time, with a peak of around 2m simultaneous viewers. That’s up by over 30 per cent on last year. Co-streams also increased by around 25 per cent to 1,500. 

Away from the main event, Gamescom announced the audience for its Awesome Indies stream more than doubled. While the Gamescom Steam Festival drew over 1m visitors, up by 43 per cent on last year. 

Of course, that’s just the beginning. VoD viewers are still consuming the content at source. Plus there’s the huge amount of related coverage across video and websites to consider. The week brought some huge announcements, which could have easily stood alone, but many titles will have benefited greatly from being showcased alongside those big beats.

From a trade perspective, the programme for the Gamescom Congress had 35 sessions and 56 experts, with a total of 118,000 following the event, which was broadcast on Twitch. Of course it’s impossible to know if these were industry professionals. 

Felix Falk, MD of Game, the German trade body said: “Gamescom 2021 has relied entirely on the power of the community. Whether co-streaming gamescom: Opening Night Live, joint quests at gamescom EPIX or even our fundraising campaign for the gamescom forest: the many shows, campaigns and the central content hub gamescom now were used millions of times by the community worldwide. In addition, we created a particularly large number of interaction opportunities this year in order to create the incomparable atmosphere of gamescom digitally as well. I am very pleased that gamescom 2021 with its many further developments was so well received. This makes it a great success for us and all the partners involved.”

Oliver Frese, MD and COO of Koelnmesse added: “I am really thrilled how well our digital offering has been received by the community worldwide again this year. A lot of heart and soul has gone into the further development of our shows, our content hub gamescom now and our cooperations from the entire team and the many partners – and it has paid off. The numbers speak for themselves and we have definitely defended our pole position as a global digital event. This puts us in the best possible position to bring the community and the industry together even more successfully next year with a hybrid gamescom 2022, both on-site in Cologne and online.”