Granted, this blog entry’s headline is not the most creative one – but I will try to make up for it in the following paragraphs:

While Thomas and Diane are already visiting panels and having meetings at the GDC Europe in Cologne, the rest of ICO’s crew is making the final preparations for their flights to the following gamescom convention starting on Wednesday. In fact, we are pretty much set and ready to go, staring at the planes taking off outside our office window at Gatwick Airport and looking forward to being on one of them tomorrow afternoon. We also finally got the confirmation for the catering service at our booth at Hall 4.1, Aisle H, Booth 055 – and as we are looking forward to seeing many of you in person, this means you can enjoy snacks and drinks while dropping by.

Like us, you may already have a busy schedule but even without having arranged a meeting you’re welcome to visit us and talk about business or finally meet in person. Whether you plan on publishing a video game in Europe, want to talk about partnerships with us or are just eager to collect the full set of our shiny new business cards, you should memorize the location of our booth.

Here is how I do it:

Germany-England 4:1, Hungary was the best team in ‘55 (before Germany won the world cup in ’56)

(EDIT: This is actually not true, but it works and could keep you busy to spot the error in the sentence)

Of course, that’s my way, easy for a German but might work for others, too.

(Now I’m back at nervously checking volcanic ash forecasts one more time)

Last week, Diane was at an Online Games summit in Ankara, keynoting the event and meeting actors of the Turkish online games industry. It was a honour to be invited there, and she was very happy to learn more about the Turkish market, which is one of the big ones in Europe already, and is still in a phase of rapid growth.

As more Asian and American eyes are turning to the European market (since market is less mature and the Chinese market is increasingly closed), Turkey is emerging as a rising star of the European region for online games. The country has the second biggest population of the region, and a majority of them are young (60% are under 35) and educated. According to a recent Comscore report, Turkey is the 3rd most engaged Internet audience in the world. The games websites category there has a 68% penetration, higher than in the UK. According to government statistics, 24% of Turks aged 16+ played network games with other people in 2008.

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The lecture went really well, even if Thomas didn’t have time to insert a few Bastille Day jokes ! The slides can be downloaded here and seen below:

To renew the disclaimer in the presentation, a lot of the numbers are estimates based on various sources. If you have official numbers for any of those games, please contact us and we’ll update it!

According to a new Comscore study (users aged 15+, Dec 08 vs Dec 07). Good news for social games !

UK, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Italy were the countries with the biggest penetration of social networking.

Also in the study : Facebook grew 443% in one year in France thanks to localization, and has now overtaken Skyrock.

The social networking landscape still remains pretty diverse in Europe – that isn’t shown in the study- but the overall usage is very high. For comparison, Emarketer recently published a similar study showing that the penetration rate was 41% in the US. That encompasses all year 2008 though, not just December as the Comscore figures.

According to this Comscore new study, there was 1 billion Internet users aged 15+ in December 2008.

Looking at the regional breakdown, Asia/Pacific comes first with 41% of the audience, but Europe comes second with 28% audience share. North America is third with 18%.

In terms of country share, if China and the US  are far ahead (China being apparently overtaking US for the first time), Germany, the UK and France come respectively #4,5 and 6, Russia is #8, while  Italy and Spain are #12 and 13 and Netherlands #15 (with 11M unique visitors, which is amazing for a 16M populated country). If you add all of them together, their share is bigger than China’s, but the fragmentation of this audience shows on the top properties breakdown where all websites are originated from US or China.

It’ll be interesting to see where Europe and US will be in the future when China, Russia, India, Brazil and Mexico continue to grow fast.