For two days on March 1 and 2, 2023, the Hamburg Games Conference drew devs, studios, publishers, media, and eager students into the Altonaer Museum. The 500 conference guests came to Hamburg from all over Germany as well as 25 countries on four continents. Rightly so, as the Hamburg Games Conference had to offer a full bouquet of insights and networking opportunities: The main track in the iconic “Figurehead Hall” of the museum covered the conference’s focus topic “Invest in Games” with 10 talks and panel discussions – from exclusive insights into MTG's games M&A strategy, to learnings from selling a games company, to discussions about salary transparency.

The second track in the museum’s lecture hall covered more hands-on dev-, funding- and start-up-topics. An additional 12 talks, workshops and panels aimed at devs and studio founders gave practical tips, from overviews over Hamburg’s funding landscape and tips how to apply for the federal games funding, to post-mortems of veritable indie hits like Dome Keeper or Battle Brothers. A total of 50 speakers and panelists from widely different parts of the games industry as well as from the investors’ side contributed to the program.

As the Hamburg Games Conference was taking place as a 100% on-site event again for the first time since 2020, networking and face-to-face exchange played a major role: The business area in the museum’s café was busy as a beehive – a total of 300 meetings were organized via MeetToMatch by the attendees, for making new contacts, opening up new business opportunities and exchanging views on industry developments. The get-together on the evening of the first conference day provided even more room for casual exchange and meeting new people from the international games industry.

The conference’s expo area was open to the public and drew in an additional 600 visitors over both conference days. Here, service providers, institutions and game studios presented themselves. Of course, we couldn’t miss this opportunity to showcase some of the awesome games developed in Hamburg: Through our Road to Hamburg Games Conference program, we provided booth space for six indie studios from Hamburg and their games.

We had a great time, listening to so many fascinating insights, making lots of new contacts as well as seeing many familiar faces from the industry in person again! We sincerely thank everyone involved in making this event happen – our co-organizers GRAEF Rechtsanwälte, our event agency Super Crowd Entertainment, the Altonaer Museum, our partner region Québec, the numerous sponsors and partners of the Hamburg Games Conference, all of our excellent 50 speakers and all of the 500 business guests!

We’re looking forward to seeing many of you again in the course of this year and also at the Hamburg Games Conference 2024! We'll announce it here and on the website of the Hamburg Games Conference: https://www.gamesconference.com/

Below you can find some impressions from both conference days. For the full set of 500+ photos, visit the Hamburg Games Conference’s Flickr account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/197816907@N07/albums/72177720306497975. Also, you can find a recap video below!

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