Hamburg Games Conference 2022: 600 visitors from the international games industry – online and in Hamburg

600 conference visitors from 35 nations joined the 13th edition of the Hamburg Games Conference on March 2 and 3, 2022. The hybrid event concept allowed visitors to catch up with contacts from the international games industry and make new connections – both on the playable online platform, custom-developed for the B2B conference, and at the on-site event in the gaming location RCADIA in Hamburg. 18 keynotes and panels with the focus “Moving Markets” gave retrospectives, insights and outlooks on the constantly changing games industry. 61 partners and exhibitors presented themselves in the digital expo and on-site. A video recap gives impressions of the conference: 

“The Hamburg Games Conference is an annual highlight and this year has once again marked the start of the international industry events. With the conference, we invite the games industry to cast their gaze towards Hamburg as a central games location in Europe. We are very happy about the great response of the participants, which is also reflected in the 100% recommendation rate in our evaluation survey,” recapitulates Dennis Schoubye, Head of Gamecity Hamburg. Gamecity Hamburg is Hamburg’s location initiative supporting the games industry and co-organizer of the conference.

“We are pleased that we were able to welcome numerous B2B guests from all over the world online and that we were also able to finally enable a face-to-face exchange again for some of our guests at the on-site event. The Hamburg Games Conference was a complete success here as the first major hybrid event of the games industry in 2022,” adds Dr. Ralph Oliver Graef, Managing Partner of the co-organizing law firm GRAEF Rechtsanwälte.

600 guests experience real conference feeling online and offline

On the conference’s online platform developed in Hamburg, participants could explore a digital world with six different virtual cities. On average, the conference visitors spent four hours on the digital platform. 61 exhibitors and partners presented themselves in a digital expo on the platform. These included major international companies such as sponsors Intel and Xsolla, and numerous companies from Hamburg and Germany, such as Hamburg-based industry players InnoGames and Bytro Labs. Also, 12 Hamburg-based games start-ups, which were supported by Gamecity Hamburg, showed their projects to the international audience.

But the digital conference world, where over 3,000 meetings between conference guests were held via video call, was not the only place to experience the conference feeling. The on-site part on the second day of the conference at RCADIA was also well attended, with 180 guests joining in person. In addition to MeetToMatch and networking, visitors were able to test games from Hamburg on site, for example the VR game “Tower Tag” by VR Nerds and the game “Project Paranoid” by the Hamburg-based studio Phoenix Reality, which offers a unique augmented reality experience.