GAMESCOM 2019 ROUND-UP

A LOOK AT WHAT THE WORLD’S BIGGEST GAMING EVENT REVEALED.

- CHRISTIAN GUYTON ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Gamescom 2019 kicked off in August, promising to be bigger and better than ever. With a record 373,000 visitors, it plays host to almost every major developer and publisher at the Koelnmesse event center in Cologne, Germany. This year’s iteration featured a never-before-seen pre-event announcement show, named Opening Night Live, and hosted by charismatic Game Awards creator Geoff Keighley. Opening Night Live threw out a huge variety of new announcements, trailers, and interviews, more closely resembling an E3 stage show than anything Gamescom has offered before.

A combination of brand-new reveals, further trailers for upcoming games, and playable demos draws global attention to Cologne, and for obvious reasons, we’ll be focusing on the games that will be coming to PC. That means we’re not going to be delving into the wide range of indie games coming to Nintendo Switch, or the PS4 exclusives that do such a good job of making us (briefly) jealous of the consoles.

There’s plenty to be excited about for the PC crowd, though. With all the big players participating—EA, Microsoft, Activision Blizzard, and more—there were plenty of new games on show. VR games and platforms had a strong showing, as did Nvidia’s ray-tracing hardware, with more games than ever added to the selection of titles supporting RTX functionality. While Gamescom was previously a consumer event, built more around gaming culture and public access to game demos, it has almost caught up with E3 in terms of proper relevance to the industry, with more new game announcements this year than any before.