So we did it! Pocket Gamer Connects London is over for another year and yet again it proved to be an incredible celebration of this amazing mobile games industry (not forgetting PC Connects and XR Connects too!).

We knew we had a monster on our hands, but now that we're back at our desks and have looked at the stats we can officially confirm that Connects London 2018, our fifth such event in the UK capital, was officially our biggest ever conference to date. Anywhere. Across every metric.

In terms of content, the event's six track rooms and the 22 hosted tracks offered the broadest and largest agenda we've yet put together. The 310 speakers delivered 180+ sessions amounting to the equivalent of 75 hours' worth of exceptional insight, lively debate and fortune-changing advice to our biggest ever audience.

In total over 1,930 delegates from 920 companies and representing 50-plus nationalities squeezed into every available corner of our venue at The Brewery – including a whole new subterranean space created just for us, the courtyard (at least the bit that wasn't populated by giant cats, astronauts or CSR-branded Ferraris), plus a sizeable chunk of the next-door Montcalm hotel.

And when it came to networking, boy did those delegates work hard, with a staggering 5,594 completed meetings tracked through our official free and unlimited matchmaking service alone. That's before you take into account the organic encounters that took place in the expo zone, the Speaker & VIP Reception, and the official after-party, or even the scheduled connections made through the SpeedMatch and Investor Matchmaking sessions.

A truly incredible line-up

Impressive as they may be though, numbers only ever tell part of the story and the final quality of any show will be defined by the speakers and speeches and ultimately the delegates themselves.

On both of these fronts we were frankly blown away. The line-up featured the biggest companies and many of the smartest, most open and all round loveliest people from the industry, including Unity's David Helgason, Lightneer's Peter Vesterbacka, Supercell's Marika Appel, Alexis Bonte from Atomico, Paul Heydon from LVP, Miles Jacobson from Sports Interactive, the Yogscast crew, Mathias Norvig of Sybo, ustwo's Dan Gray, Paul Gouge of Playdemic, Jagex CEO Phil Mansell, ESL's James Dean, John Peterson of Jam City, Mike Bithell and literally hundreds of others. We really could go on… and on.

Supported by the best

Then, of course, there were the incredible sponsors and exhibitors, who not only got behind the event financially but also really engaged with the sharing, open and fun spirit.

So massive kudos is due to our Platinum partner ZPLAY Ads and Gold sponsors Unity, Appodeal, Facebook, Mobvista, British Columbia and Vancouver Economic Commission, Product Madness, Outfit7, Papaya and UpCloud.

Also much love is due to Silver support from MoPub, Smartly, Hatch, GameSparks, Zorka.Mobi, Scientific Revenue, Yeahmobi, LiftOff, Delta DNA, Playdemic, First Parallel, track and BIP sponsors Game Insight, Jagex, Unreal Engine, Round Zero, Fingersoft, Amazon AppStore and Reality Clash plus the amazing party and reception partners Gram Games and White Nights Conference, plus happy hour sponsor NaturalMotion…

(To discover more about all of these amazing companies together with our equally lovely bronze and associate sponsors, you should check out the links to their profile pages here.)

Sharing the love

Obviously, aside from the speakers and sponsors, the show itself was a veritable A to Z of the modern games ecosystem with everyone from students and indie devs through media, monetisation experts and tool makers, all the way up to the triple-A international publishers and investors showing their face, sharing beers (at what was one of our most awesome parties yet) and keeping the meeting system in near permanent meltdown.

So above all we need to say thanks to all you awesome people and your incredible spirit, openness and goodwill that creates the feel of a real ‘games industry family’ get together that we ultimately aspire to in all of our activities.

There really was a lot of love in that venue and we definitely felt it, so thank you.

We really do hope you had an inspirational, productive and fun time at PG Connects London – I know we certainly did. Heck, we may even do it again next year… or, um, in a couple of months! See you in San Francisco!

Oh and did we mention the Mobile Games Awards? That seemed to go pretty well, too! ;-)