Overall Gamescom (trade day August 19th) was very interesting, the traditional industry was out in force with giant stands in spite or maybe because of a drop in sales of about 33% YoY in June / July.Online players were a lot more discrete, only present in the trade area. Interesting when you think that this where most of the growth will be coming from over the next 5 years. The only MMOG players that were out in force with a large stand were WoW and Dofus (ok and Wharhammer was kind of there to within the giant EA stand and the conference org seems to like Twitter).Most of the big releases that were announced were for traditional offline games with a lot of interest for Avatar and the new Starcraft.  Dofus 2.0 was the only major MMOG announcement. In terms of the offline games that I felt were interesting was Ruse from Ubisoft, a wargame that looked really cool.

I also had a series of very interesting meetings but I can’t talk about them yet J

Just before GamesCom there was a GDC conference and from an online perspective I think the following were probably the most interesting talks as reproduced by Gamasutra:

Playdom VP panel on social gaming

Gameforge CEO, Klaas Kersting Keynote (great guy by the way, a real industry leader)