The global games industry gathers for the vast Gamescom trade fair in Cologne this week, with hopes that upcoming heavy-hitters like “GTA VI” can help the industry escape its doldrums.

Tuesday’s opening night event will show off major releases slated for the months ahead, with the starring role going to “Black Ops 7” — the new instalment in the sprawling “Call of Duty” saga.

Trade visitors will have Wednesday to peruse the stands and make connections, before tens of thousands of enthusiastic gamers are unleashed on the vast salon from Thursday to Sunday.

Last year’s Gamescom drew almost 335,000 people to the Cologne exhibition centre, where studios lay on vast stands with consoles or PCs offering hands-on play with the latest releases.

Nintendo is back in 2025 after staying away last year, surfing on record launch sales for its Switch 2 console.

And Microsoft’s Xbox gaming division will show off new portable hardware expected to be released towards the end of the year.

Sony, the Japanese giant behind the PlayStation, has opted out this time around.

The mood is mixed for the roughly 1,500 exhibitors attending this year, as major publishers have recently steered back into profitability but the job cuts seen over the past two years continue.

In early July, Microsoft said it would lay off around 9,000 people, with hundreds leaving game studios like “Candy Crush” developer King and several games cancelled, including “Perfect Dark” and “Everwild”.

– Battle for attention –

“The industry is consolidating quite a bit” after the bumper years when Covid-19 lockdowns created a captive audience, said Rhys Elliott of specialist games data firm Alinea Analytics.

Around 30,000 workers have lost their jobs since early 2023, according to tracking site Games Industry Layoffs — more than 4,000 of them so far this year.

Revenue in the global games market should hold steady at just under $190 billion this year, data firm Newzoo has forecast.

The number of players and hours spent with the medium are stable while an ever-expanding number of titles are jostling for attention.

And with leviathans like “Roblox” or “Fortnite” swallowing the attention of hundreds of millions of monthly users, “everyone’s fighting for a smaller share of that pie,” said Circana expert Mat Piscatella.

The need to find new audiences has pushed Microsoft’s Xbox, the biggest games publisher in the world, to switch strategy, increasingly offering its titles on competing console makers’ hardware.

“They’ve had really great success on the PlayStation platform. Sony is making a bunch of money on that too,” Piscatella said

“It’s a little bit of a win-win all the way around.”

Some PlayStation games are making the trip in the opposite direction, with “Helldivers 2” the first to be made available on Xbox as well as the traditional PC port.