Looking Ahead: GDC Europe
Conference director Frank Sliwka explains the changes from GCDC and outlines the event's aims
While the summer trip to Leipzig has become standard in the past few years - either for Games Convention, its GCDC conference, or both - this year it's all change. Games Convention Online (Leipzig), gamescom (Cologne) and GDC Europe (Cologne) are the new options for this summer.
Here, Frank Sliwka, VP of European business development at Think Services, explains some of the reasoning behind the changes and looks ahead to the topics that GDC Europe will tackle next month.
I think what we've learned from the past is that it's a good thing to have a publishing event together with a developing event. It means that in a short time, you have the chance to meet all of the important people around the games industry - development, publishing and trade - everyone at one time in one place. That's what I learned in my previous years.
What we'd like to have this year is that really both events are on a European level. That's why the publisher association, BIU, made the decision to go to a bigger city which has more international direct flight connections from all over Europe - you can fly from Spain directly to Cologne, for example, and two or three connections per day from London. That's one point - everybody is able to have a one- or two-day visit to Cologne and can meet all of the games industry, to discuss the issues.
So we want to install a brand that stands for international business, that's established for years in the games industry and create a European hub that has a bridge to the US market - not just from the US, but back to it as well.
That means we have one brand that has other conferences on other continents, so we can have a better exchange of meetings, topics, business and so on. This we've already got with GDC - maybe we can expand it in the next few years to Asia, and then we have a model that I would like to see, so that you'd have, in Cologne for Europe, visitors from North America and Asia... but you also have the opportunity to go back to them with other events.
GDC Europe will be held in the Congress Center East, which is directly in the Cologne convention centre. It also has a direct connection to the business area at gamescom, which starts on the Wednesday. So we're integrated into the whole system.
The Congress Center itself can house thousands of attendees - it's a really big one, and the biggest room has the capacity for 1500-1600 people. And we also have an exhibition area on the second floor which already has around 30 exhibitors - last year [at GCDC] we had eight.
So it's really a much bigger area than we had last year. From the exhibition there are also opportunities to give lectures, discussions, and so on, and the whole place has all the technical equipment that you'd need for a conference.