1st of September, 2023 – During this year’s gamescom, the global gaming conference, the world discovered the first-ever Ukraine Pavilion. This booth brought together game dev studios, event organizers, service providers, and industry-related startups, showcasing Ukraine and their projects.

“Our pavilion had three goals:

1. Supporting Ukraine’s positive image as a technologically developed country with a lot of professionals.

2. Uniting our game dev industry, because together we are stronger and can collaborate and share experiences.

3. Last but not least, especially considering wartime circumstances, attracting investments into the Ukrainian game development market.

As a result, we not only highlighted the immense potential of Ukrainian game development – an industry that continues to thrive despite the war – but we also came together, which is especially important now. Each pavilion participant found new partners and friends and got in touch with both global and domestic enterprises. We truly hope that this positive tradition of unity and cooperation will only continue to grow,” shared Oleg Yavorsky, Business Development Director of VG Entertainment and one of the organizers of the Ukraine Pavilion.

The establishment of the booth was possible thanks to gamescom and the primary partner and sponsor for indie developers, USAID Competetive Economy Program in Ukraine. Supported by the USAID Program, six indie teams had the opportunity to participate in the tradeshow: Twigames, Starni Games, Open Bi Sea, VR Five, Gerillaz та GameFi2.0 Lab.

The USAID Competitive Economy Program in Ukraine (USAID CEP) supports startups, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) aiming to support competitive industries and firms on Ukrainian and international markets, foster a better business-enabling environment, and enable Ukrainian companies to benefit from international trade.

More than 40 companies related to Ukrainian game development united at the event:

• Organizers: VG Entertainment, Games Gathering, GDBAY;

• Game development studios: GSC Game World, Frogwares, Frag Lab, Fishing Planet, 4A Games, Tatem Games, Red Beat, Room 8 Group, Farom Studio, Bini Games, PlayToMax, Plazma Studio, Black Snow;

• Service companies and platforms: Postmodern.ua, Drope.me, Values Value, Room 8 Group;

• Online partners: Pulsoid, MK:TRanslations, Gamirare, Arima, Keep Up Games, Spacedev, Vireye, Hum3D, Whimsy Games, Extela, Sandman Team;

• Communication partners: Games Branding, Play UA;

• Technical partner: AMD;

• Business networking partner: MeetToMatch.

More details about the history of the Ukraine Pavilion, participants’ intros, reflections on the event, and pictures from gamescom 2023 can be found on the website www.gamesukraine.com.