GAMESCOM 2023: THE FANCENSUS VERDICT
As the biggest consumer and trade events in the industry calendar, Gamescom always creates a stir amongst both games media and fans. It’s the perfect platform for studios and publishers, from triple-A to indie, to unveil upcoming games and land ever-important publicity ahead of the Autumn and Christmas launch windows.
Using our Fusion platform, we have looked at which games got the most media hype during Gamescom last week, and whether being featured during the Opening Night Live (ONL) showcase had a positive effect on overall coverage levels from games journalists.
Top 20 Games With Most Press Coverage:
As the biggest and most-hyped game on show this year, Starfield got the most headlines and media mentions both in the opening night show, and overall during the week. Clearly, there’s a lot of expectation around Bethesda's first new IP in more than two decades.
Deep Silver’s Payday 3 was in the top 10 games for press coverage; this isn’t a complete shock since Payday 2 still has around 40,000 daily players. Coverage was boosted by celebrity endorsement as rapper ICE T revealed a special gameplay trailer for a mission he’ll appear in during ONL.
Cyberpunk 2077’s new DLC, Phantom Liberty, came third for coverage figures during Gamescom - the only DLC announcement in the top 20. Following on from the botched launch back in 2020, Projekt Red has continued to improve the game, and the coverage of the DLC shows just how much interest there still is for the game.
Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero, both from Chinese studio MiHoYo, were the only mobile-centric games to make the top 20 by coverage - and neither was featured in Opening Night Live. Genshin Impact didn’t announce anything new in the actual game, but it did release a trailer for its upcoming global series of live concerts of its in-game music. The only mobile title that did get featured during ONL was Marvel Snap, but that wasn’t enough to get it into the top 20 list.
Top 20 Indie Games With Most Press Coverage
The only indie games (in the top 20) that were featured during ONL were Nightingale, Dustborn, Thank Goodness You’re Here and Last Epoch - making up four of the five most talked about indie games. Interestingly, Flashback 2 - a sequel to the now 30-year old original - wasn’t featured at ONL, but secured the number four slot for most covered indie games, and it generated more dedicated articles than the others in the top five, which were mostly mentioned as part of round-ups.
Overall, the media interest in Gamescom 2023 proved to be is bigger than ever, with the volume of coverage about the 2023 event and the games on show increasing by 10% over 2022. The big showpiece of Opening Night Live is still a major media draw, with most of the games featured going on to dominate the media coverage for the rest of the week - with a few notable exceptions such as Flashback 2. Overall, 53% of the total media coverage was about the games featured in Opening Night Live.
