World’s largest gaming event could break its own record with biggest ever attendance

You might think of videogames as being a purely virtual activity, but this week the annual Gamescom event, which takes place in Cologne, Germany every August, is going to prove you wrong.

Gamescom – a four-day event that this year encompasses a long weekend over 20-24 August – is the largest videogame convention in the world, drawing staggering crowds every year.

Packing out Cologne’s Koelnmesse convention centre since 2009, Gamescom serves as a place for developers to show off their games at demo booths for the public, as well as network with other industry professionals. 2024’s event saw 335,000 gamers pass through the Koelnmesse, including 1,462 exhibitors from both tiny independent studios and the biggest AAA brands in the world.

You might think that’s a lot, and it is – you’d need 4,187 London double decker buses to transport all those geeks – but it still hasn’t reached the highs of Gamescom’s record attendance figures in 2019. That year hit an unbelievable 373,000 people!

That makes Gamescom not only the largest videogame event in the world, but one of the largest events of any kind, full stop.

That doesn’t mean that more modest events aren’t important record breakers in their own right, though.

The Blackpool Magic Convention, for example, is officially recognized as the world’s largest magic convention. Every year 5,000 magicians and enthusiasts gather in the UK’s famous seaside resort to share their passion (although, of course, they never reveal the secret to their tricks…).

Is Gamescom poised to break its own attendance record again? Maybe so, as it has been increasing its attendance numbers every year since 2020 (when the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic).

But there are other videogame conventions around the world that are getting close to yoinking Gamescom’s record themselves. The Taipei Game Show and Brazil Game Show, which take place in Taiwan and Brazil, respectively, are now both regularly seeing attendance of over 300,000 gamers.

We’ll keep an eye on the developments, as is our wont, and let you know which global game event levels up over the coming months!