Interactive Success

NRW on the Way to Being the Number One Location for Digital Media

For the tenth year in a row, NRW has proven itself as the ideas factory and engine room of the German television landscape. The 2010 Formatt study reveals that one in every three minutes broadcast is filmed in the Rhine/Ruhr region – about the same amount that is produced in the next three Federal States, Bavaria, Hamburg and Berlin, put together. Now, NRW is well on its way to becoming the number one location for digital media.

The region is establishing itself as the German centre of the computer gaming industry: Many top game developers have set themselves up around Cologne and Dusseldorf, in particular, and in the Ruhr region and East Westphalia, including Bluebyte, Phenomenia, Zone2Media, Piranha Bytes and Nurogames.
»North Rhine-Westphalia has the potential to become one of the leading gaming locations in Europe in the next few years,« emphasises Marc Ziegler, CEO of the location agency Mediencluster NRW. »In addition to branches of EA and Ubisoft, the Federal State is also home to numerous renowned, innovative developers. With gamescom and the Games Developer Conference, Europe’s leading event for the gaming industry has been held annually in Cologne since 2009. The LARA central gaming awards, and the German Developer Prize, are also regularly held in NRW.« With that, the gaming industry has definitively proven to be an essential component of the regional media landscape – and not only in a commercial context.

Land of industry leaders

The region’s media landscape exhibits Germany’s broadest service provider infrastructure in the areas of online media and mobile communications. In addition to that, the region if Germany’s leading film and television production location. When Commissioner Thiel and Professor Boerne conduct their investigations in Tatort Münster, produced by Cologne’s Colonia Media, the viewer numbers have even been known to better the ratings for a Formula 1 race – as happened recently, in May 2010.
The Government of North Rhine-Westphalia has committed to the expansion of the digital industry: Measures are being put in place not only to strengthen the entire industry, but also to provide support for the structural change being undergone by established media players through the formation of networks. Mediencluster NRW is the first point of contact for these tasks.