I was at Quo Vadis in Berlin earlier this week, and these are some of my takeaways:

• Everyone loves GTA IV. GTA IV and CoD 4 were the games everyone wished they would be making.
• CipSoft is probably the most successful unknown German game developer. Tibia is a huge success internationally, with sales that almost everyone else would die for.
• Never eat food from street vendors. My stomach has been in turmoil since Tuesday. The flight home was hell.
• There are still MMORPGs in which you run the risk of a full 24 hours of rollback. Your players are probably a lot more forgiving than you give them credit.
• Germany is missing the boat in online gaming. With the exception of some of the new kids who started out as browser games.
• We are still discussing violence. That debate is so last year. Still, Friday saw a panel on the issue of violence in games, but for some reason no mention of the new legislation that passed the same day.
• It’s still a very small industry. Germany has about 2,800 people developing games, and nobody is hiring foreign talent or interested in accommodating them. Even companies of 100+ employees still use German as their internal language.