Bringing the real gamescom festival experience into a digital one

In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, gamescom could only take place purely digitally. For 2021, the organizers decided to rebuild the gamescom now digital platform from scratch. With help from SHOPMACHER, what was once a pandemic stopgap grew into a successful hybrid concept. The challenge now is to continuously optimize both the physical and the digital experience and to interlock the two.

gamescom is not an ordinary business trade fair but a festival where, in non-pandemic times, hundreds of thousands of people flock to the fairgrounds and through Cologne. gamescom wanted to transfer this experience to the internet. SHOPMACHER were brought on board for concept, design and implementation, and in the end they also took on full project responsibility. The technical foundation was formed by the headless systems from Hygraph and Frontastic.

The fact that many SHOPMACHER employees are gamers themselves in their spare time was a good starting point for the project. From a gamer's perspective, it is easier to anticipate and meet the needs of potential gamescom fans. The result is a platform whose design draws on typical gaming platforms, offers a good overview of the games alongside live streams and lives up to the high visual and conceptual standards of the gaming community.

A core aspect of the digital experience is "gamescom EPIX", introduced in 2020. Originally designed as a system for community challenges where visitors could complete quests, it was extended with digital trading cards in 2024. These were developed together with influencers and drawn by artists from the gamescom community. The success speaks for itself: last year, 200,000 quests were completed, which contributed significantly to traffic on the website.

On top of that, the on-site experience was improved through digital services

Another important requirement from the organizers was to give the many partners represented on the platform, which included around 60 large international publishers and developers, the ability to manage their own content independently ahead of the event. Naturally, they were not allowed any insight into their competitors' preparations, since strictly confidential information about new releases was being entered here as well. For SHOPMACHER, this was their own "quest", because Hygraph, like all other CMS systems, was originally designed for use within a single company where all employees can also see everything.

Another challenge was making sure the platform could withstand the rush of visitors. gamescom is traditionally opened the evening before with "gamescom: Opening Night Live", which is broadcast worldwide to an audience of millions. While there is barely any traffic on the platform beforehand, visits shoot up massively from one moment to the next during the show. The interplay of Frontastic, Hygraph and SHOPMACHER worked smoothly every year and delivered consistently very good performance throughout the entire event.

In 2024, SHOPMACHER also took on the task of improving the physical fair experience through digital innovation. A digital queue management system tackled one of the biggest challenges of the on-site fair: the long wait times at popular booths. Visitors can now book time slots in advance via the gamescom website and get direct access to the exhibitors of their choice. Well-known exhibitors such as Xbox, Bandai Namco and Porsche used the solution successfully. To keep optimizing the system, a SHOPMACHER team was on site throughout the fair and rolled out 29 updates during live operation, without any interruptions for visitors.

gamescom has not only mastered the challenges of the pandemic but emerged stronger from it. With the combination of a physical fair and a digital platform, it reaches more people today than ever before and offers an improved experience to both on-site visitors and digital participants. The original goal of transferring the gamescom festival feeling to the internet was not only achieved but expanded into new dimensions. Today the digital platform is no longer just a substitute but an extension and enrichment of the physical fair.

"With our community adventure gamescom epix, we created a highly entertaining way for gamescom fans to dive into the gamescom universe before, during and after gamescom, on the grounds and/or online," says Cornelia Köhler, Strategic Marketing Communications Manager at Koelnmesse. "At the same time, epix lets our many partners present themselves to our community in a maximally captivating way. With the gamescom trading cards, we extended epix this year with an aspect that encourages even more exchange among players. Our results show that it worked. In the end, we owe all of this to the tireless work of our team, our social media consultant Patrick Teeuwen and our agency Shopmacher," Köhler adds.