Game Two: To be (not?) Continued

German gaming TV show Game Two, which has become a cult favourite, faces a massive shake-up in the summer of 2025: TV partner ZDFneo is pulling out of the project and the future of the format is uncertain.

Production company Rocket Beans Entertainment announced the bad news to the community in a blog post. The blog post contains both good and bad news. On the one hand, the contract with ZDFneo as broadcasting partner has apparently been extended until summer 2025. On the other hand, ZDFneo has apparently announced that it will be permanently terminated after that. The broadcaster has stated that, as part of its portfolio development, it will prioritise the expansion of its fiction offering for young people and show formats with a broader thematic focus, Rocket Beans says in the post. The company regrets the decision, but is happy and grateful for the broadcaster's confidence over the last years.

However, the Hamburg-based company is not giving up the format completely. "We continue to believe in our product and are firmly convinced that there is a need for such a format in the German media landscape," the blog reads. It is therefore possible that Game Two will continue with another partner after the summer of 2025. While the future is uncertain for the time being, it is clear that the impending end of the collaboration will be very different from the end of its predecessor, Game One.

Game One was a pioneer of gaming formats on German television and ran on MTV from 2006 to 2014. MTV's withdrawal was a turning point for production company Rocket Beans Entertainment, which went on to expand its YouTube channel RocketBeansTV into an award-winning 24-hour internet broadcaster. In recent years, there have been a number of conceptual adjustments, including a greater focus on formats such as Game Two, which launched in 2016. In October 2023, Game Two overtook Game One in terms of the number of episodes produced.