Click here for your e-zine detailing Hamburg in Germany as a hub of game development.
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In many gaming circles, Germany was once regarded as the home of good, solid PC strategy games, and the place where the blood of your enemies was served up green – if indeed the authorities of the region allowed it to be seen at all. Nowadays, production of PC strategy games has slowed to a dribble, and, though government types still maintain what is hardly a relaxed attitude to the world’s most dynamic form of in-home entertainment, they are at least attempting to understand it. Change is happening, and the rewiring of the game industry is turning Hamburg into one of the most important, forward-focused locations in the world.

More and more people are looking to the internet for their gaming, whether through web browsers or dedicated clients, and in the likes of Bigpoint and Gamigo, Hamburg has truly world-class players that are mapping out the future for the sector. Crucially, their audiences aren’t just kids hanging out online to toy with free webgames, but paying consumers, cumulatively handing over millions of Euros in micropayments to play. Mirroring the framework in regions such as South Korea, it is a proven, dependable economic model. As hugely profitable as it is, however, and perhaps scarily for traditionalists, it is only beginning to gather steam.

But Hamburg isn’t only about developing and publishing games on the internet. Within its districts can be found a pioneer in high-end PC gaming kit (Roccat), a console and PC game developer renowned for sports titles which also has the unusual honour of being the only studio in Germany to have released a Dreamcast title (49Games), one of Europe’s most prolific and successful mobile game developers (Fishlabs), a studio that counts old-school legends from the likes of Rainbow Arts among its staff (SnapDragon Games), and a company passionately dedicated to keeping alive the art of adventure games (Daedalic Entertainment). Reflecting the city’s open-minded nature as a whole, just about every type of game industry interest is represented in Hamburg, and in this edition of Region Specific we talk to the people leading the way about what they’ve achieved so far, and what further change they expect for the future.