February 03, 2020

How to translate the real gamescom festival experience into a digital experience

About gamescom

Challenge

Implementation

The team benefited from the fact that many SHOPMACHER employees are gamers themselves in their free time. This enabled them to easily put themselves in the shoes of potential gamescom fans and take their needs into account. The result is a platform whose design is based on typical gaming platforms, which, in addition to live streams, also provides a good overview of the games and meets the high visual and conceptual standards of the gaming community.

The users themselves should also be encouraged to interact more digitally through gamification elements. For this purpose “gamescom EPIX” was created. Visitors could complete so-called quests as part of community challenges that were developed together with a social media agency. If these were done, a vault with prizes was opened.

An important requirement of the organizers was also to give the many partners represented on the platform, which also included around 60 major international publishers and developers, the opportunity to maintain their content independently in the run-up to the event. Of course, they were not allowed to get any insight into the preparations of their competitors, since top secret information about new releases was also entered here. For the SHOPMACHER, this was their own “quest” because graphCMS – like all other CMS systems – was originally designed for use within a company in which all employees can also see everything.

Another challenge was to ensure that the platform could withstand the onslaught of visitors. Because gamescom is traditionally opened the evening before with “gamescom: Opening Night Live”, which is broadcast to an audience of millions worldwide. While previously there was hardly any access to the platform, visits during the show skyrocket from one moment to the next. The interaction of Frontastic, graphCMS and SHOPMACHER worked smoothly and offered consistently good performance throughout the event.

Result

The organizers are satisfied. “I’m really excited about how well our digital offering was accepted by the community worldwide again this year,” says Oliver Frese, Managing Director and COO of Koelnmesse. “A lot of heart and soul went into the further development of our shows, our content hub gamescom now and our cooperations from the whole team and the many partners – it 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 starting position to bring the community and the industry together in Cologne and online even more successfully next year with a hybrid gamescom 2022.”

Felix Falk, Managing Director of game – Association of the German Games Industry: “gamescom 2021 relied entirely on the power of the community. Whether co-streams of gamescom: Opening Night Live, joint quests at gamescom EPIX or 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, this year we have created a particularly large number of interaction options in order to create the incomparable atmosphere of gamescom digitally as well. I am very pleased that gamescom 2021 with its many further developments has been so well received. That makes it a great success for us and all partners involved.”

CHARACTERISTICS