Krakow - the capital of gamedev. Digital Dragons Conference 2025 has come to an end

This year’s edition, continuously organized since 2012 by the Krakow Technology Park, attracted representatives from over 900 companies. Across six parallel lecture halls, nearly 190 speakers delivered a diverse program of talks and panel discussions, while the ICE Krakow Congress Centre buzzed with nearly 2500 business meetings.

What sets Digital Dragons Conference apart on the European event map is its strong business focus. The conference is primarily a B2B space—a meeting point for representatives of major tech and game development companies (such as AMD, Activision, Larian Studios, Dell, and CD PROJEKT RED) as well as young indie studios looking to attract investors, publishers, and media attention, which was also present in large numbers.

To support indie developers, organizers provided a large Indie Zone, where creators showcased their projects and competed for Indie Dragons Awards, presented for the first time on the main stage during Monday’s Digital Dragons Awards Gala powered by Activision | Elsewhere. Selected studios have also pitched their games to potential business partners during the Digital Dragons Arena.

This year, the Indie Zone was accompanied by a special Steam event, organized in collaboration with Valve, giving indie projects exceptional visibility through promotion on the front page of the world’s most popular game store.

The competition concluded with the presentation of statuettes for Best Pitch Award (won by Rabid Rat) and Community Vote Award to the winners of the audience vote (Atomnius). The latter - courtesy of 11 bit studios, authors of the best game of the year 2024, Frostpunk 2 - were also able to enjoy a prize donated to them and sponsored by AMD (Technology & Indie Zone Partner of the conference) in the form of a workstation with a 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processor, 256GB of DDR5 RAM and a powerful 2TB drive made by Western Digital.

Developers from 11 bit studios received the most prestigious and longest-standing awards in the Polish game industry —Digital Dragons Awards—in three categories: Best Polish Game, Best Polish Game Design, and Best Polish Game Audio. Other winners were: Critical Hit Games – Best Polish Visual Game Art, Best Polish Narrative, Rage Quit Games – Best Mobile Game and LocalThunk – Best Foreign Game.

Digital Dragons Awards Gala powered by Activision | Elsewhere was streamed live by Webedia Polska media outlets — GRYOnline.pl and tvgry. Additionally, viewers could follow interviews with game creators on YouTube, Twitch, and X. Webedia has also awarded scriptwelder, winners of the Indie Dragons Awards, with a promotional campaign voucher worth 25.000 PLN.

The conference featured six parallel lecture halls and thematic summits at Q Hotel Plus Krakow — including Legal Summit powered by Rymarz Zdort Maruta and Game Design Summit powered by Anshar Studios & Fool’s Theory.

Among the most notable speakers were Ion Hazzikostas, Game Director of World of Warcraft, Josh Sawyer, known for his work on Fallout: New Vegas, the sound team behind Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 — Jan Valta, Adam Sporka, and Vojtěch Nedvěd; as well as Celia Hodent, co-creator of Fortnite.

The conference was also rich in networking opportunities, with numerous accompanying events such as the Badge Pickup Party powered by Reality Games on Sunday, the exclusive VIP Party, the Monday night Digital Dragons Party powered by Activision | Elsewhere held at Forty Kleparz, and the closing Happy Hour Mingle powered by Epic.

All of these elements were part of the broader Digital Dragons Hub initiative, which supports the game development industry through educational programs, acceleration for indie studios, and coordination of the Sectoral Council for Competences – Gaming and GameDev.

Województwo Małopolskie is the Main Partner of the event: the regional authorities implementing a range of projects that serve innovation and economic development of Małopolska, and its attractiveness for investors. Małopolska is a perfect location for running business, particularly based on new technologies. Evidence of that is the number of new ventures growing every year, including dynamically developing tech start-ups. Thanks to the massive support given to entrepreneurship and the optimal utilization of EU funds and other public funds, Województwo Małopolskie positively stands out among other voivodships.

The Main Sponsor of Digital Dragons Conference 2025 is Activision. Announced in 2024, Elsewhere Entertainment is a new Activision studio based in Malmö, Sweden, and Warsaw, Poland.  The team is in development of a new narrative-based and genre-defining AAA franchise based on a new IP.  Elsewhere’s vision is to create a state-of-the-art franchise inspired from bold ideas for an enduring legacy that resonates beyond games. 

Founded in 1979, Activision is a leading worldwide developer, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment and products on consoles, PC and mobile.  Built from the ground up, Elsewhere is Activision’s newest studio and is continuing to add world-class talent to its ranks. For more information visit Careers at Elsewhere.

Krakow is a modern metropolis with over a million people working in it. Krakow is 132 thousand students, 23 higher education institutions, including 7 universities, over 280 international corporations employing nearly 101 thousand people in sectors such as finance, IT, services, research and development, business analytics. We base the development of the city, among others on intelligent management and strengthening the sector of modern services and research and development. That is why we focus on innovation and effective cooperation between science, business and local government.