Harry's hot takes: 5 things to expect from Gamescom 2018

Gamescom is happening next week. If you don't know what Gamescom is, it's basically several large hangar-sized building filled with videogames, swag, shouting, bright lights, and sweat.

Every year other, lesser sites, create lists that ponder as to what might happen over the course of Gamescom week. These lists are called predictions, and more often than not they're utterly incorrect.

The reason they're incorrect is that they lack the necessary heat profile to reach truth. They are cold takes, tepid at best, and so they are doomed to fail before they have even reached true maturity.

These takes though, the takes I'm hurling at you right now, are hotter than the core of the sun. They're so hot you need to wear protective clothing to just enter the same room as them. Here are my predictions for what's going to happen at Gamescom this year.

Whether it's your first or fiftieth time attending, whether you're press or public, developer or PR, volunteer or one of the kids I met outside last year drinking beer on the street at 9am, this is the list for you.

It's impossible to overstate just how noisy Gamescom is. Imagine if you were in a constant volume battle with all of the other people who live within 300 metres of you.
All of your entertainment is turned up full blast, and you're screaming incoherent nonsense at the top of your voice. That's Gamescom.

And I bet you that no one has ever had the nerve to go up to each and every exhibitor and ask them politely if they wouldn't mind turning it down a bit. That's all it would take, one true heart to take the step that no one else is willing to take.

The problem with all shows is that essentially everything looks the same. There's the noisy bright bits, and then the corridors covered in posters and adverts linking them together. It's not a case of IF you get turned around and wander off in the wrong direction, it's a case of WHEN.

There's a very good chance that this year someone is going to get lost for good, doomed to forever wander those long corridors, pining for a time when they had something to do other than wander around long corridors. Who knows, it might be you.

Whenever anyone goes to Gamescom they become afflicted by a disease. This disease compels them to ask you about sausages at every given moment.

"Have you eaten any sausages?" "I had a sausage for breakfast." "Oh, look, a small shop that exclusively sells sausages."

Some people are immune to this disease, and will find the whole thing rather problematic. Don't worry though, as soon as the afflicted leave Germany, you'll find that their overwhelming obsession with offal-filled skin tubes dies away.

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I have no idea how the people who are sat down at expos like Gamescom managed to find seats. They must literally be at the head of the queue when doors open, sprint across to the branded bean bags, and remain there for the entire day.

There aren't enough chairs, uncomfortable sofas, or tiny stools to go around. You will walk until your feet are sore and your calves are weeping, and eventually lay down in the middle of a thoroughfare, tramped over by countless nerds, in order to get the rest you so fiercely crave.

There's going to be one thing on the show floor that leaves you feeling shook. It's going to feel like stepping into the future, like a glimpse twenty years forward to what gaming is going to be like when you're even older than you are now.

You'll want to love it, you'll want to heap praise on it, but deep down you'll know that the world isn't ready for whatever it's offering. Cloud computing? Streaming services? A modular controller? Something about sausages? It'll be a great idea, but without the market space it needs it will die.

You will not shed a tear for it, but you will remember it more clearly than all the destined-to-be-successful triple A suck fests that you'll spend hours queuing for and play for eight minutes.