Berlin is a city defined by unification. This year it celebrates the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a barrier that separated East from West Berlin for nearly 30 years, and in the time since the city has become an international hub for European trade, finance and politics. The videogame industry here, meanwhile, is leading the way when it comes to integrating traditional and new business models, as veteran studios rub shoulders with hugely successful mobile and browser-focused developers, exchanging staff and knowledge while a thriving startup scene swells around them.
Local studios are welcoming foreign investors too: the past two years have seen an influx of international companies looking to stake their claim in Berlin’s vibrant development community. Its increasing appeal to game companies has been catalysed by a number of extremely supportive government and privately funded organisations keen to capitalise on its growth and present the location on the world stage.
One of those bodies, Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg, has been drumming up excitement for the past seven years. Founded in its current form in 2004, Medienboard offers a range of services, including project funding, and is involved in many of the industry events that take place in the region. “Berlin is a big metropolis, a city hotspot, while Brandenburg is a rural area surrounding it,” Medienboard’s Ina Göring explains. “It made sense to combine the two federal states, so we merged them. That’s unique, because Berlin and Brandenburg are separate states with different politics and politicians.”
Another initiative Medienboard set up is games.net, a network established in 2012 which, among other things, provides a database of those working in the local game industry. “Games.net is the most important network in the region,” Goring continues. “It’s under the umbrella of media.net, and we already have more than 50 companies listed. Games.net sets up a lot of networking events, helps with the exchange of ideas, and organised the Gamescom booth for Berlin Brandenburg companies. It’s mainly funded by Medienboard, and we work together with them a lot.”
In 2006, Medienboard set up a fund called Innovative Audio Visual Content, which was created to help developers fund their projects. The first year saw two applications, but it has since grown to be a key resource for both local startups as well as companies moving to the area. And there is more help for foreign investors from Berlin Partner, the city’s economic development board, which promotes the region internationally and softens the landing for new arrivals.
“We help find a location, establish what subsidies are available, help to find talent, provide information on the recruiting process, and organise tours for new employees,” Birgit Reuter, media project manager at Berlin Partner, tells us. “We try to make the bureaucracy of moving a bit less terrible for international people! Many companies employ up to 75 per cent of their staff from other countries, and part of why I think a lot of companies come to Berlin is because it is so international and it attracts international talent.”
One of those international companies is Candy Crush Saga creator King, which has recently opened a development studio in Berlin headed up by Gabriel Hacker, who formerly worked for Bigpoint, Take Two Interactive and Perfect World Europe. King Berlin is an autonomous studio working on mobile game prototypes for its parent company, and it’s in good company. California-headquartered Kabam, one of the world’s leading and most adaptive mobile game producers, has also opened an office in Berlin – albeit one focused on supporting existing projects rather than creating new ones.
“We have this really amazing mixture of creatives and technologists all trying to push boundaries in different ways, and all doing it in a city that supports that really well,” Kenneth Go, senior director of studio operations, tells us. “And I think that’s one of the best things about being in Berlin: being able to experience that energy of change, but also experience a city that is supporting it and reinforcing it in many ways. You walk down the street and every single month you’ll see different things happening, whether it’s different people, different cultures coming in, or shops changing. That feeling of constant change and replenishment and energy – it kind of imbibes you in your daily life and the work that you do. It gives you more energy to push forward, and to push the boundaries as well.”
Bigpoint is no stranger to change, having transformed the way it approaches development in recent years, flattening its hierarchy and handing greater creative control to its team members. The Berlin office is focused on the company’s core browser games, such as Drakensang Online, Dark Orbit and Game Of Thrones, all produced using the studio’s Nebula 3 engine – tech which has been iterated over a ten year period since first powering the Drakensang series’ retail releases. Yager’s history stretches back to the ’90s, too, and the studio behind Spec Ops: The Line and Dead Island 2 now represents Berlin’s last remaining traditional triple-A studio. But while Yager’s business model might appear old-fashioned to its local peers, it’s no less capable of transformation, as we discover during our visit.
It’s perhaps the Berlin-founded mobile game studio Wooga that best represents the region’s vibrant energy and creative churn. The company has instigated a filtering system that sees a large number of teams working on multiple projects with a view to launching only two or three of them. But while other companies might not be so explicit about it, there’s an intoxicating atmosphere of pioneering spirit that pervades every studio we visit – this is a collection of developers that’s very aware of its place at the forefront of an evolving industry, and one that looks set to grow at a relentless pace over the coming years.
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A fantastic little claymation short that asks you (you being a chef) to prepare a dinner for a singularly fussy diner, who isn't all that fond of hot sauce, or being poisoned to death. It's a one-minute game: you select the ingredients, you watch Chef chop and prepare them, and then you see how your efforts go down. The animations, especially the facial expressions, are particularly good, while the joins between the video and the hyperlinky interactions are almost seamless. Most importantly though, Chef is funny–really funny. I had a big stupid smile plastered all over my face the whole way through.
