Our 3 Hot Trends from Gamescom 2022

Devcom, Gamescom and a lot of Cologne hugging.

With highs above 30C every day, and the usual lack of air conditioning in accommodation in Germany, it was hot. Even the conference center, the Koelnmesse, was atypically warm and not the usual refrigerated halls. The conference center had clearly (and rightly) turned down electric usage in light of the current climate and energy crises.

I know we’re all mentally done talking about this, but as the first large conference AdInMo have been to since the pandemic we couldn’t completely ignore the topic. Remote working and distributed teams do in fact work (more on that from AdInMo soon!), but it really is nice to be back to in-person meetings as well. I’m American: I miss hugs! I gave out a lot of hugs. 

Mobile:

This is a trend years in the making, but mobile continues to be the platform of choice for publishers and developers looking to reach the largest audiences. Whether AAA or indie, and whether game styles and genres, or monetization and development methods (see below) mobile gaming is leading innovation in the games industry.

Alternate development platforms:

While Unity is still the preferred development platform for mobile games, other platforms are gaining traction. Unreal in particular is getting mindshare from developers, and is no longer purely the domain of AAA studios. A few indie developers are already working with AdInMo’s beta Unreal SDK, and there will be a lot more soon. Beyond Unreal and Unity, developers are experimenting with other alternate development platforms such as Godot, or developing their own engines. 

New monetization methods:

The games industry is always looking for new and novel ways to monetize, and 2022 seems to be the year that developers have multiple potential options available to them. On the showfloor interesting monetization opportunities included sales off the app stores using solutions such as Xsolla (who as sponsors of Gamescom seemed to have their branding everywhere, BTW), and NFT and blockchain games are still generating lots of noise albeit few actual game launches with meaningful numbers of users. As well as in-game advertising of course!

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