German Developer Award: A triple farewell for Mimimi

With three awards, Mimimi Games is the winner of the German Developer Award 2023, bidding farewell in absentia to the stage on which it celebrated for the first time in 2009. This bittersweet farewell aside, the GDAs was a grand celebration of the German industry.

Around 500 guests gathered at the Flora in Cologne on 7 December for the 20th German Developer Award ceremony, the unofficial Christmas party of the German games development industry, despite the fact that the train drivers' union GDL was on strike at the same time. The evening was hosted by Rocket Beans co-founder Daniel Budiman and actress and voice actress Lynne Glaner, in an entertaining production of presenter and AI voice.

As for the awards themselves, the evening was dominated by Mimimi Games. The Munich-based studio, which announced its closure a few months ago, won a total of three awards, but did not travel to Cologne due to the liquidation process. This was despite the fact that they won second place in the Gamesload Newcomer Award at the German Game Developer Award 2009 with Grounded, a feat they repeated in 2010 with daWindci.

In their place, Assemble Entertainment founder Stefan Marcinek took to the stage on behalf of Johannes Roth and Dominik Abe, who promptly took off his shirt during his first appearance to reveal the Mimimi T-shirt underneath. And so Marcinek accepted the DEP for "Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew", first for Best Graphics, then for Best Sound Design and finally for the top category "Best German Game".

Mimimi had already won several awards at the German Developer Award once before, in 2016, with "Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun". A few months later, the title also won two German Computer Game Awards, including "Best German Game". It remains to be seen whether this will be the case again at the upcoming awards ceremony. Only one thing was different from 2016: while Mimimi Games was also honoured as Studio of the Year, this year the trophy went to Hesse not to Bavaria, namely to Deck13. There were also many other beaming winners from all over Germany, making the DEP once again the unofficial Christmas party of the German games industry, and a successful evening both in Cologne's Flora and on the screens in the stream.