LogInWith only a few weeks left till Early Bird pricing ends on May 31, the devcom developer conference 2025 (#ddc2025) has announced its first major program highlights.
Europe’s largest game developer event returns to the Koelnmesse Confex Conference and Exhibition Centre in Cologne from August 17-19, 2025, following its record-breaking 2024 edition that attracted over 5,000 industry professionals from 83 countries.
Headlining the first wave of speaker reveals is the keynote from the creators of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. For the first time ever, Ievgen Grygorovych, CEO & Game Director, and Mariia Grygorovych, Creative Director at GSC Game World, will reflect on the game’s extraordinary development process before an audience.
Other early program highlights include:
From Storming to Performing: Coaching Game Dev Teams to Build Resilience in Chaos Fleur Marty, Executive Producer at Gearbox, will explore how game development teams can adapt and thrive in unpredictable, high-pressure environments. Drawing from her production experience and coaching methodologies, Marty will provide actionable strategies for fostering psychological safety, managing team dynamics, and converting uncertainty into creative momentum.
Something, Something Design Pillars: Adventures in Product Design Anders Lauridsen, CEO of High North Studios, presents a case study of Skald to showcase how disciplined product design, guided by passion and purpose, can lead to successful positioning and marketing of niche games. The session offers both strategic insight and practical takeaways for design-oriented studio leadership.
Postmortem: Rescue on Fractalus! – 40 Years Later David Fox, President and Co-Founder of Electric Eggplant and one of the original employees at Lucasfilm Games, will reflect on the development of Rescue on Fractalus!, one of the earliest examples of real-time 3D in games. Fox will share stories about the technical breakthroughs, team dynamics, early contributions from George Lucas, and how a “throwaway project” became a cult classic. Attendees will hear how the game was pirated before release, and why it remains influential four decades later.
These sessions are a small preview of what devcom developer conference 2025 will offer. As in previous years, the conference will be held in a hybrid format, combining the in-person experience at the Confex with full online access through the Digital Pass.
In 2024, devcom saw over 5,000 unique participants, a 45 percent increase over the previous year, along with 350+ speakers across more than 210 sessions and 17+ stages. Attendees represented 1,660 companies from 83 countries. Scholarship programs gave more than 200 participants free access and networking support and are to be expanded for 2025, as well as the Indie Expo and Showcase that supported developers in presenting their games.
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