gamescom 2026: Inside the Memory Economy

15 September 2026 - This year, Raptor had a different approach. Shortly before the event, we launched EGG, short for Early Gaming Growth, a month before the event. It's our communications offer for early-stage founders, helping them turn commercial experience and technical expertise into industry credibility before they're ready for a full comms programme.

Raptor has spent five years going through this process ourselves. For most of that time it wasn't necessarily conscious, but we've been sharing our expertise and proving ourselves time and time again. This year at Gamescom, I focused less on the usual networking and more on putting that reputation to work directly. My days belonged to the CEO suites, to clients and partners, conversations that went somewhere because they gave people a reason to remember us beyond the introduction. Meanwhile, the wider team were on the show floor networking and consulting clients, helping get our name out there in a more traditional sense.

For our Account Manager Joshua Callaghan, connecting with our client base was a key priority: “My time at gamescom was as much about touching base with our existing clients, as it was meeting new people in the industry. I met several key contacts IRL for the first time; always a slightly surreal experience after a year of Google Meets and Slack conversations! I spent time hearing the real impact of how PR activity is benefiting their businesses, and connecting with them as fellow gaming fans too!” 

While I was mainly in the backrooms of gamescom itself, I did find time to mix it up on Thursday night at our own event: The Cathedral Checkpoint, held at Wartesaal am Dom, steps from Cologne Cathedral. The invite-only soiree was hosted by us, Midwest Games, Breeze, PlaySafe ID and Make-A-Wish International. We chose to partner with them because of the people behind them, leaders with real networks across investment, publishing, console, PC and mobile. It was so good to see the room be full of people from different regions and generations.

Chris, our Business Development Account Executive, only joined us in January and went to his first conference with only a few contacts in the gaming industry. At our event, he knew half the room. He said "reputation in this industry is everything, you're in a room with prospects, friends and competitors, and everyone's operating on the same currency." The event was a huge hit with almost 150 attendees and plenty of riveting conversations in every corner of the room.

150 people like that in one room doesn't happen by accident. A curated room gives people space to actually talk instead of just being seen, and that's where the real relationship building happens. When you're sitting across from someone, they're asking, without asking directly, whether you're credible and whether you can help them make more money. For Raptor, that's taken five years of consistent visibility, built on very little budget, letting us enter these conversations confidently, knowing that our reputation precedes us.

None of that stops when the doors close on Thursday night, or when gamescom wraps for the year. Credibility in this industry has to be built before it's needed, an informed perspective shared consistently is what eventually turns into recognition, and a single event, however big, is never the whole strategy. We call this the "Memory Economy". I've said before that gamescom works best as one chapter in an ongoing story, and that's the same discipline, showing up consistently long before and after the show instead of making noise for four days and going quiet.

Images from Raptor's gamescom mixer, the Cathedral Checkpoint, can be found here.

By Rana Rahman, CEO & Founder