Germany enjoys an extraordinarily good reputation in many areas around the world. Our cars are valued and driven all over the world, machines built in this country are the second most important export good of the Federal Republic. And – not to forget – the beer! The German barley juice has probably turned quite a few tourists’ heads. Or caused a headache. So while our country is perfectly capable of making headlines around the world in the above industries, domestic video game developers rarely make blockbuster games that are played on every continent. But why is that? The games industry in particular was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the corona pandemic, which made numerous Germans discover their love for the controller – or mouse and keyboard, we don’t judge. We spoke to numerous experts and went in search of clues.
Gaming industry benefits from corona pandemic
But before we let them have their say, we cannot avoid taking a look at the figures. This once again illustrates the enormous influence of the corona-related lockdown, curfews and the like on the leisure behavior of Germans.
As the association of the German games industry “Game” announced in a press release, sales of video games, gaming hardware and gaming online services in Germany increased by one percent to 9.87 billion euros in 2022.
Sounds like solid numbers. But if we take a look at the recent past, the percentage growth from the current statistics can hardly be compared with that from previous years.
In 2020 the market had grown by a whopping 32 percent, in 2021 it was still 17 percent. Despite the rather stagnant sales development, video games remain the entertainment medium with the highest sales in Germany according to “Game” – ahead of music, books and films.
Also interesting: According to a study by the Games Association, 34.3 million people in Germany now play video games. Almost every second German is a gamer! According to statistics, the average age of the players is 37.9 years. For comparison: in 2014 this was 31 years.
Source: games
Almost the entire turnover goes abroad
These numbers should at least make us gamers happy, as they show that the industry of our favorite hobby is doing extremely well.
But there is a catch: only a fraction of the almost 10 billion euros that Germans spend on games and the like remain in their own country.
As Felix Falk, head of the “Game” industry association, reports, in the past less than five percent of sales went into the pockets of local developers. Last year, the number was not even collected.
Market leaders are developers from Japan such as Sony, Nintendo or Bandai Namco, as well as studios from the USA, where EA, Activision-Blizzard and Microsoft are based.
Hardly any blockbuster game comes from Germany
According to Falk, a more “medium-sized character” prevails in Germany. That means: There are quite a few good, independent German games that ensure respectable success. The big blockbusters, which sell hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide and inspire gamers around the world, are not developed in this country.
That also proves one Statistics from the news portal GamesWirtschaft.de. Accordingly, in the past twelve months there have been 23 games that have been sold at least 100,000 times in Germany.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Activision Blizzard), FIFA 23 (Electronic Arts), Hogwarts Legacy (Warner Bros.) and Nintendo Switch Sports (Nintendo) occupy the top four spots, each with over 600,000 units sold. All developers are from the USA or – in the case of Nintendo – from Japan.
According to the evaluation, in the past three years there has not even been a single game that has sold more than 100,000 copies and was developed in this country. However, the game company Giants Software, based in Schlieren in neighboring Switzerland, achieved a notable success. It launched Farming Simulator 22 in 2021, which was sold more than 500,000 times.
The video game industry in the wake of “killer games”
But why is it now that international developers are so successful, while studios from German-speaking countries at most manage a respectable success? We spoke to the publicist Olaf Zimmermann, who has been the managing director of the German Cultural Council since 1997. In his opinion, Germany is “more of a sales market for computer games than a development market.”
Olaf Zimmerman
Source: Olaf Zimmermann
In search of reasons for this, he goes back more than a decade: “A little more than 15 years ago, politicians in the federal and state governments outdid each other with their proposals for laws to protect young people and adults from computer and video games to enact.
That was the time when every outbreak of violence supposedly started in electronic games.” This development, when reports about the medium of video games were at most in connection with the so-called “killer games”, damaged the development of the industry in Germany.
Artistic freedom also for video games
According to Zimmermann, however, a lot has happened since this debate. Nowadays, hardly anyone doubts that computer games are also cultural assets, and in some cases even works of art.
And the violence that was so condemned years ago is now accepted as a stylistic device for telling a story – just as it has always been in novels or films, for example. Artistic freedom for video games has arrived, albeit with a delay.
Zimmermann sees a great need for action in the industry, especially with regard to the training of junior staff. He advises developer studios to train prospective programmers and developers more often themselves using the dual training system. But colleges and universities are also obliged to make larger training capacities available.
There is also a shortage of skilled workers in the video game industry in this country. This could best be remedied with the points mentioned above in the training of young people, because: “In an international context, German computer game companies compete with Japanese, Canadian and US developers for qualified workers and often lose out. Barriers are often language and visa regulations ‘ explains Zimmerman.
Lack of self-understanding as the main problem?
However, the managing director of the German Cultural Council sees the biggest need for the domestic games industry to catch up in another area. He accuses the developers of a lack of artistic self-image:
“Almost everyone on a film set feels like an artist. The actors, the screenwriters, the directors. Only the creators of the cultural heritage of video games see themselves as artists only in exceptional cases.”
Zimmermann therefore has the suspicion that society perceives the video game industry as part of the culture much more naturally than it perceives itself.
German studios in an international comparison
Another reason why German development studios rarely release internationally acclaimed blockbuster games is also based on a look at the number of employees. According to the statistics portal statista.de For example, Nintendo employed around 6,700 people worldwide in the past calendar year, while the US group Activision Blizzard employs almost twice as many people with 13,000 employees. Manpower that German companies simply lack.
