Gamescom, two syllables likely to fill your heart with either dread or joy, begins next week. Knowledge is a media partner for the world's largest game show, and opens its coverage with an interview with director Tim Endres. (Tune in next Friday for our reporting from the event itself.)

Next, we speak to Slitherine publishing head Marco Minoli about the wresting of Game Workshop's Blood Bowl license from troubled Nacon while supporting developer Cyanide.

And then triple-A job-hunting horrors in Social Commentary and Warren Spector calling time on his career in Extra. See you in the Koelnmesse.

Gamescom 2026 is already breaking records. For the first time in the show's history, the exhibition floor at Koelnmesse is completely booked out, with organisers confirming this week that more than 1,600 exhibitors from 67 countries will attend the show, up from 1,568 in 2025. 

While bookings are up, exhibition space sits at 233,000 square metres this year, identical to 2025's total: the show itself remains the same size. 

"Being sold out for the first time is of course great news for us," Tim Endres, director gamescom at Koelnmesse, tells Knowledge. "For me, the important point is what it means behind the number. We have more exhibitors than ever before, more studios and publishers who want to meet their communities, get direct feedback and build relationships. That shows the industry is still looking ahead." 

Total sellout 

The Gamescom indie area has grown 16 per cent year-on-year to more than 420 companies, an all-time high, and the country pavilion programme has expanded from 40 countries last year to 47. Endres is wary of reading the triple-A-versus-indie split as a contest for space. 

"Different games need a different approach at gamescom," he says. "The triple-A publishers create huge, spectacular booths, and the entertainment area alone has four-and-a-half halls full of them, so the indie area looks much smaller on the whole plan. They naturally work with smaller budgets, so we offer formats that fit their needs. We don't prioritise anyone or any specific sector – we just try to give everyone the best platform, and stronger demand each year shows we're succeeding." 

Koelnmesse's gigantic site still has space left beyond Gamescom's current footprint, running to more than 280,000 square metres against this year's 233,000. Endres confirms 2027 expansion plans are already under way, though he isn't ready to detail them. 

"We are actively working on ways to expand the event in 2027," he says. "I'm not yet able to talk about it. When the picture becomes clearer, we will share it, but it will take some time. There's going to be great news."

"One connected journey" 

This is the first year that developer conference Gamescom Dev, previously titled Devcom, has been fully folded into the main show. This year's B2B event is to include 230 sessions and in the region of 380 speakers across 18 stages, with two new AI-focused tracks. 

"The integration is really about one simple idea: developers are a core part of Gamescom, not something separate," Endres explains. 

"The conference has been closely connected to Gamescom for many years, also as Devcom, so the rebranding was a natural step. What's new starting in 2026 is that attendees can really feel it: shared accreditation for journalists, stronger integration into the Gamescom B2B app, shared stages and networking infrastructure, and combined five-day business tickets for the whole week. Gamescom is becoming one connected journey from Monday onwards." 

Does Koelnmesse's own closed-door executive event, the Gamescom Dev Leadership Summit in Lisbon each February, mean deal-making has migrated there while the Cologne version becomes a GDC-alike? Endres rejects the idea. 

"We never clone anything," he says. "Lisbon is about 200 people. At Gamescom Dev, it's several thousand, and combined with the Gamescom business area we're talking about more than 30,000 business people doing business in Cologne. There's nothing which is really comparable. Lisbon is more about valuable contact with specific people, and finding out how we can improve the concept for Gamescom." 

The world comes to Cologne 

Gamescom is about more than Germany, of course, with regional events now well entrenched. Gamescom Asia runs alongside Thailand Game Show in Bangkok, and Gamescom Latam continues to grow in Sao Paulo. 

"Gamescom is definitely global. Cologne is the home base," Endres says. "Not everyone from the industry can come to Cologne every year, so we started regional editions. Bangkok looks pretty good this year, and Sao Paulo is growing too. They build bridges to Cologne, and that means more awareness of Gamescom than before. Last year we had the highest growth in trade visitors from Canada, Japan, Southeast Asia and Latin America." 

That pull is visible in Gamescom's Chinese and Korean exhibitor list, with Tencent, HoYoverse, Level Infinite, Krafton and NetEase all present – growth Endres puts down to both strategy and organic demand. 

"It's kind of both," he says. "Japan and Japanese games have been part of Gamescom for many years, and what feels a bit different now is the stronger participation from other Asian markets, especially China and Korea. Gamescom is a gateway to international audiences for those studios and publishers, who can reach fans in Europe on-site and through our digital reach, and get direct feedback from a global community, sometimes feedback that even influences the development of a game." 

Underpinning it all is a physical-digital hybrid model built since 2019, which saw the launching of Opening Night Live: last year's show, presented by Geoff Keighley, drew around 100 million streams. Regardless of the online component, though, Endres, who has been with Gamescom since it began in 2008 as a show of 400 exhibitors and just over 200,000 visitors, sees this year's sellout as confirmation that the physical show still matters. 

"What we see is this constantly rising number of exhibitors," he says. "If you look at the different sectors, triple-A or indie, you see growth everywhere. That shows physical events like Gamescom, especially combined with the hybrid approach, are still very much relevant."

How does licensed IP move around the industry? What happens to the studios responsible for creating the games? And what does it mean for players waiting for games involved in financial swaps that could cause years-long delays?

British strategy publisher Slitherine Software announced in July that it had acquired the licence, publishing rights and back catalogue for Games Workshop's Blood Bowl from Nacon, whose parent, Bigben Interactive, defaulted on a bond repayment earlier this year and was pushed into insolvency proceedings. Several Nacon subsidiaries, including long-time Blood Bowl developer Cyanide, were swept into the same process. Marco Minoli, Slitherine's director of publishing, speaks to Knowledge about extracting the franchise from Nacon, and what comes next.

Three deals, not one

The Blood Bowl deal was not a single acquisition. "We've had to broker three different deals," Minoli tells us. "One is the acquisition of the assets belonging to Nacon. One is the acquisition of the licence, because Nacon had a licence for Blood Bowl from Games Workshop. But also, we wanted to secure ongoing development, so we had to broker a deal to get support from the existing developer."

Slitherine's existing relationship with Games Workshop – which already includes four properties – smoothed the licensing talks.

"I keep referring to them as the best partners to work with in general," Minoli says. "They will tell you what is possible and not possible very clearly. There's no blurred lines or anything."

The acquisition process was competitive and fast. "There was competition. I can't tell you who else, but there was competition," Minoli says, putting the whole deal at six weeks from start to finish, against years of informal collaboration before Slitherine's 2024 acquisition of Battlefront, developer of the Combat Mission series.

Warhammer Blood Bowl: a moving target

Warhammer Blood Bowl – the next mainline game that runs on the same engine as 2022's Blood Bowl 3, with a reworked UI and two new factions – was originally slated for a spring launch under Nacon. It slipped amid the insolvency proceedings, and Minoli won't commit to a firm date even now.

"This is a conversation we're having every week," he says. "There's a lot of expectation, and it's all about what is going to be possible in this timeframe."

The bellwether will be a new demo built around Rumble Mode, a seven-a-side variant designed to onboard new players: "If the feedback for that demo is good, then we know we're going to be readier to release at the end of the year."

Blood Bowl 2 owners will carry their content over for free, and the paused World Championship restarts in December, timed to the new release.

"We need the new Warhammer out before we start the new championship," Minoli explains.

Also behind ambiguity over the new release sits the problem of unwinding Blood Bowl 3's existing monetisation strategy.

"If anything, the business model of Blood Bowl 3 is insanely complicated. My take is that if we cannot explain a business model in fewer than ten words, then we won't do it."

The model's transformation isn't frictionless: factions loyal players expected to unlock through playtime are now sold outright.

"People are expecting that if they played a certain amount of hours, they get a faction for free. Now that's a purchasable item on Steam, and they're not happy about it. But we don't want to make factions a premium gift for players who play a lot. We want to make it available to everyone."

Opportunistic, not a strategy

Blood Bowl joins a Warhammer line-up at Slitherine that already includes Gladius and Battlesector. Minoli doesn't expect much crossover in audience, saying "it's very rare that people buy all of your games. We probably get ten per cent of people that will buy three or four of our games."

But Blood Bowl does correspond perfectly with Slitherine's editorial line, that of licensed digital versions of real tabletop games, alongside Bolt Action and the newly announced Memoir '44.

"Blood Bowl fits very well into this category, with a huge following that could work very well as a digital product," Minoli says. He is unapologetic about the size of the audience: "Strategy games are about 15 per cent of the PC gaming market, but the core games are almost like hobbies. It's not a genre, it's a hobby. Niche is great. Hobby means passion, and it's much more rewarding than selling a million copies of something, from a certain point of view."

As to whether Blood Bowl marks a deliberate pivot toward vulturing distressed assets, Minoli resists the idea.

"It's very opportunistic," he says. "We don't have a strategy of going after distressed studios. We're looking at the market as a whole, and the market is in a very weird transition right now." He cites consoles cycling in and out of favour, plus premium mobile titles returning after years of free-to-play dominance.

What he describes as genuinely difficult is not spotting the opportunities, but hiring the people equipped to chase them.

"We put a lot of effort now in trying to select the right people that have this almost like entrepreneurial attitude," he says. "It's very hard."

SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Highlights from industry chat channels

When 24 Entertainment set out to explore Tang-dynasty-era China through the medium of a particularly violent action game, the Hangzhou-based studio wanted to set it apart from the great many examples of the form that involve people smacking other people in the face.  

In the studio's forthcoming Blood Message, "you don’t go into ten soldiers and just kick their asses," creative director Xingyan Gu tells us. "We want players to take every fight as a life-or-death fight. You don't do those fancy movie moves. It's dirty. You have to struggle, and a surprise can happen in every blow." 

If you caught the demo video from Blood Message's Summer Game Fest showing, you will have seen some of this play out. In Edge 427, out now, we take a closer look at the project, discussing its representation of Chinese history, how it incorporates influences from western productions, its use of continuous shots, and lots more.     

Elsewhere, we investigate the unstoppable rise of the detective game, consider the secret lives of NPCs, and talk to Hangar 13 to discover how it created Mafia: The Old Country. We also meet with French developer DigiXart for this issue's Studio Profile, and revisit Tenchu: Stealth Assassins for Time Extend.  

The Blood Of Dawnwalker, Out Of Words and Hunger are among the forthcoming releases previewed in Hype, while Big Walk, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced and Splatoon Raiders open this issue's review section. Also, naturally, Steven Poole has a run at leading the Reform Party in Trigger Happy.  

Edge 427 is available from UK retailers now and online here. 

We'll be back next week. In the meantime, don't forget to share your feedback with us by email ([email protected]), and follow us via Bluesky and LinkedIn.