Frederik Hammes, who took over from Stephan Reichart as managing director of Gamescom Dev this year, says the results of the Gamescom Dev speaker survey show that smaller studios represent the biggest opportunity in the games market right now.
“You’re able to do more with fewer people, but the business aspect doesn’t go away,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz. “If you’re only three people, it still means somebody has to take care of the business side. I like to believe that [Gamescom Dev] is a place where they can get everything in one place – production knowledge, coding knowledge, development knowledge, creative input, design, but also learn about how to run that business because, despite all the technology, that’s still very important.”
In August 2025, Devcom was rebranded as Gamescom Dev, and Hammes says that the rebranding essentially extends Gamescom to a full week.
“I think the arguments for getting closer to Gamescom are strong,” he says. “We have a huge, big, strong partner at our side now, and that has a lot of advantages. To name practical ones, it’s easier to understand for people who maybe haven’t been here. So before, it was two conferences, two kinds of tickets, two different ways to purchase the tickets, and really little connection between the two. Now, it’s one ticket shop. You have all the stuff there that you want. It’s the Gamescom business week, it’s from Monday through Friday. If you come here, buy a ticket, you can also venture over to Gamescom until Friday.”
This year, the show boasts 390 speakers and 220 sessions across 17 stages. “It shouldn’t be a numbers game,” Hammes says. “It shouldn’t be that we have to reach this or that level. It’s always a question of supply and demand. We feel it’s becoming more specialised.”
The Gamescom Dev MD says that the show’s growth is somewhat limited by its venue, the Confex Center at Koelnmesse. At the moment, the show fits into this space, but there is “limited room to grow”, he says. But if the games industry continues on its current path, the event might have to expand and become “closer to Gamescom”.
“Right now the plans are not to become way bigger because then there will be a bigger undertaking to maybe be physically closer to Gamescom, which is a possibility. “If you think ahead, that process I was describing earlier – smaller studios, that kind of democratisation of game development – if that goes on, we might need more room to be able to cater to everybody.”
Devcom started in 2017 to fill the gap left by the departure of the GDC Europe conference. Though the San Francisco-based GDC is an obvious rival to Gamescom Dev because it addresses similar audiences and topics, Hammes says he doesn’t see it that way, saying there is a great sense of “community… behind the scenes”.
“We’re still different companies,” he says. “Everyone wants to make money, but it’s not as cutthroat as I would say. And in the end, it’s a global circus, so to speak, in a good way. People travel from conference to conference. It’s not about extinguishing other conferences and being the only ones. If everybody’s doing well, it means the whole industry is doing well. At the moment, our colleagues at GDC are having some issues that they’re not at fault for with the environment that they have to operate in right now. And I hope that it’s getting better. We hope everybody will be doing fine, to be quite honest.”
One new addition to the Gamescom Dev schedule is its slate of Leadership Summits. These are one-day events where the games industry’s top brass can speak in a room without press, microphones, or recording. Hammes says that it’s important for the sector’s leadership to have a “safe space” to discuss the turbulent waters of the games market at the moment.
“It’s not so much listening. It’s speaking up. It’s exchanging,” he says. “I was in the room when it started. We had a show of hands for how many people in the room had to deliver bad news in that year, and all the hands went up. Asked how many people had heard bad news for their company that year; all their hands stayed up. It’s a tricky environment right now, obviously. We want to provide a safe space for people, for leaders, to open up because it’s tricky to open up when you’re at a certain level and all you’re used to doing is projecting strength and trying to appear stable and all that.”
The aforementioned speaker survey shows an industry divided when it comes to artificial intelligence. 47% of speakers say that this will be the most impactful development on the industry across the next three years, but only 11% of respondents said that AI literacy was the most important skill people will have to develop.
“How does it correlate? You could say either we overestimate the impact that AI will have or we under prepare for it,” Hammes explains. “My conclusion is it’s neither, actually, because if you ask what is actually the most important skill, it is leadership. 27% say leadership is the most important skill. That translates to: ‘We know change is coming. We don’t look for technology and for skills in that technology to rescue us. We’re looking for people’. We’re looking for leaders who show us the way how to deal with it.”