The crowd at Gamescom.
The crowd at Gamescom.
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Gamescom’s clues about a game industry recovery | The DeanBeat

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 8 min

With more than 30,000 layoffs in the past 2.5 years, the game industry’s resilience and adaptability has been pushed the breaking point.

But at Gamescom 2024, the big expo for video games in Cologne, Germany, I saw signs of life and recovery. I walked 73,363 steps, or 31.7 miles, in the last seven days at Gamescom, Devcom and IEM Cologne. I ran 33 stories during the week. My sleep numbers were not so impressive. And I barely scratched the surface of the 230,000 square meters of space that was available to see across all of Gamescom.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.