Posted December 31, 1969 by Scott Parrino

In Los Angeles, California at 2005?s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), a press conference on German entertainment software was held by GfK and G.A.M.E. about the gaming market in Germany.

GfK gave a clean and efficient PowerPoint presentation on the figures of sales and volume of entertainment software in Germany. Gaming entertainment in Germany has grown to be an integral part of life from the casual to core player. With the rise of electronic entertainment comes with it a strong market and prices of the units. In 2004, PC entertainment sold more than 80 million units from the past 3 years from 2002. These numbers dominate over console and other non-PC games, accounting for over 50% of the total units sold.

As much as the PC is popular, consoles have their spot in Germany as well. For consoles PS2 is wildly popular in Germany, followed by PS1, Game Boy Advance, GameCube, and then Xbox. Don?t let your eyes fool you, PS1 is in 2nd place!

PC software and video games have seen a rise in sales for the past few years even with rising prices. Xbox currently has the highest priced software, with GameCube behind it slightly. PS2 games are cheaper than both by ten or so Euros, which would explain why PS2 is one of the most owned consoles in Germany.

The last half of the conference was led by G.A.M.E. (German Games Developers Association, trust me it is in German so it fits), an organization that represents more than 50% of German game developers. G.A.M.E. assists developers with 12 workshops a year to optimize daily business, as there are few developers in Germany today. There are publisher summits every two months as well, with about 6 to 7 German publishers meeting for a day each. G.A.M.E. also provides legal assistance as well as a professional internet presence. They maintain an extensive contact database with more than 300 contacts around in Germany.

You may wonder what games and developers come from Germany. Popular games such as Far Cry, Soldner, Gothic, and Sacred hail from Germany, with German developers like Yager, Rotobug, and Aruba.

The conference ended with a few questions from the crowd. An interesting question posed by our staff on software piracy in Germany, to which GfK answered that nearly 20% of total profit is lost from illegal game downloads or copies.