Appearing for the first time, the Iranian gaming leaders showcased a number of different gaming genres at their stand including first person shooters and action packed adventure chronicles. Speaking of the difficulties they faced, head of Parsan Business Development Studio’s, Amir Tarbyatjoui said “We need more investors. The (United States of America) sanctions do affect our industry, but they cannot stop it.” He added “We are using this event to promote what is happening in the Iranian games industry. We believe we have more potential and we want to promote that potential.”

Amongst the range of Iranian games on offer was Ras Games developed ‘Age of Pahlevans”, a game in the role-playing genre aimed towards Iranian mythology. Head of the developer Bahram Borgheai said “Persia has been around for a very long time.” Explaining that whilst the western world used myths of the Norse and Greek, Iranian games tended to focus on Persian culture “What we have is something quite unique and we are using the event in Cologne to show that to the world.”

Questioned on the media storm surrounding the ‘Special Operation 85: Hostage Rescue’ title which involved battling American and Israeli soldiers, Mr Borgheai said “We never heard about it in Iran. It certainly wasn’t released there and the first I heard about it was through the international media. If it was made then I would guess they just took an existing game and stuck a few textures and the like onto it; it certainly wasn’t a new game.”

Though stating that Cologne had been successful, he ruled out further exhibiting at Los Angeles’s E3 Expo explaining that relations between America and Iran were still to tense.

Explaining that the firm had seen an 18per cent rise in retail sales in Germany, he expressed that the future expansion of digital downloads would aid the market. “We’re seeing companies like Amazon take a larger market share, and the growth of digital distribution, but it’s going to be a long-term development as people still want to have something in their hands,” he explained.

Meanwhile British based publisher Eidos spoke of the problems the gaming industry are experiencing with the second-hand sector. President Ian Livingstone said “The pre-owned market is a serious problem, because there is no benefit to developers or publishers. A shop makes a bigger margin on a pre-owned title, and can sell them six or seven times, so there is no incentive for them to reorder and the content creator gets no slice of the action.” This is because though retailers have to pay royalties for sales on new products, second hand games can be sold for sole profit.

Mr Livingstone predicted that over 25per cent of the gaming sector’s turnover was created by second hand game sales and that as a result developers were changing their methods. Industry leaders explained that most companies now needed to make top ten products to turn a profit, meaning that developers were becoming far more careful with the games they created.