Ah, yes, the main event-- GAMESCOM! Just think of all the great games which have been unveiled at Gamescom:
...Huh, actually, not much is coming to mind. How's your list of greatest Gamescom reveals ever? Not a lot, right? There's a reason for that actually, and it's a factor which hasn't had much presence in this conversation so far.
Gamescom ain't shit
Gamecom has been a third-rate event for its history, as was Leipzig before it. The show has massive attendance because 1. it's open to the public, 2. it advertises itself as a big event because it has open doors, and 3, it coagulates all the small countries of Europe into a central convention hall, and there can be a lot of small-deal business to do with these entities (particularly for the Christmas season orders) which otherwise aren't that important to deal with. So it feels big, and the press makes the most meal of it that they can, but as a trade show and as a consumer event, it has little impact on the market (especially now in the digital era where publishers don't rely on regional distributors to shift product around countries they don't have stakes in,) and it's so near to both the holiday shopping season and the previous E3 (or now "Summer of Games") announcement season that it's a bad place to debut software.
Just look through its history. Last year we saw a Borderlands 4 teaser, the year before a new season of Diablo was the headline, PT came out during Gamescom, usually there's some CoD stuff there and THQ or Nordic or whatever they're called now trots out its slate. Stuff like that happens at Gamescom. Otherwise companies just re-announce+ what they previously announced in June and then they fill the floor with old games or the E3 demo of what's coming out in the next month for the holidays. It's the "
World's Largest Game Convention", but in terms of generating hype or moving units or doing anything which these events are designed to do, it's a paper tiger.
