Public voting for the TIGA & Edge Game of the Year award is now open, and you can cast your vote here. The winner will be announced at the 2014 TIGA Awards, which takes place on November 6 at OXO2 on London’s Southbank. The deadline for submitting your vote is Tuesday October 20. If you’d…
In E267, we visited Hamburg to check in on its thriving, online-game-focused development scene. Germany’s other development hub, Berlin, has had similar success in the browser and F2P markets, but many of the city’s studios have recently turned their attentions to mobile games and are proving every bit as successful there, too. The scene is…
Berlin is a city defined by unification. This year it celebrates the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a barrier that separated East from West Berlin for nearly 30 years, and in the time since the city has become an international hub for European trade, finance and politics. The videogame industry here,…
The most striking aspect of the offices of Berlin Partner For Business And Technology, the location for today’s roundtable discussion, are the elevators that move between the floors in the building’s large glass atrium. Constructed of brushed steel and wood, with a hint of simplified Art Deco to their shape and design, they suggest that…
Bigpoint had a turbulent 2012. The company axed 120 jobs and saw its CEO step down as its success stuttered. Today, however, the studio behind Battlestar Galactica Online, Drakensang Online and DarkOrbit Reloaded is practically unrecognisable. New attitudes to development, players and, perhaps most importantly, staff have reversed that decline and put the company in a…
Spec Ops: The Line, Yager’s powerful exploration of wartime morality, cleverly subverted genre conventions to carve out its own space. The studio itself is no stranger to standing apart, either, since it’s one of the few remaining traditional development studios in Berlin – there’s not even a whisper of mobile or browser games during our visit.…
Wooga wants its staff to fail. That is, the rapidly expanding mobile game studio isn’t afraid to take risks and get things wrong along the way. Its recently instated Hit Filter process ensures that while there are many games in production at any one time, only the best make it to market. But, thanks to so-called…
King’s Berlin studio held its opening party just a few days before our visit, as evidenced by the balloons that still decorate its work spaces. Not that they feel particularly out of place: the office’s most striking feature is the slide that wraps around its spiral staircase. After a couple of tests of that feature…
Berlin and Brandenburg offer a substantial amount of support for both established game companies and those looking to invest in the region. We meet with Berlin Partner For Business And Technology project manager Birgit Reuter and Medienboard’s Ina Göring – two of the key people driving gaming’s growth – to discuss what’s on offer for…
Kabam has grown from a handful of people creating games above a dim sum restaurant in Mountain View, California, to a global operation with more than 800 employees worldwide. Perhaps even more impressively, it has done so in the space of five years. Its recently opened Berlin office is headed up by Kenneth Go, and…
