Is the Gore-Law still a problem?
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/08/04/german-video-game-laws-explained#.U-tEMC_r7Q8

Well we, your next-door neighbour on the left side, know it. Anno is awesome !

I wonder why nobody mentioned Daedalic yet, the de-facto point and click adventure developer of this era in gaming, which had a lot of great games and comercial success the last ~7 years.

Most german developers just concentrate on PC, because that platform is bigger than any console around here. I think many games don't even see a relese outside of germany. Besides that, not that many AAA developers but more small studios. I don't think that's a bad thing though.

One of my favourite studios is Daedalic. They made "Edna bricht aus" (don't know the english title, if there even is one), the Deponia series and some other Adventures that I enjoyed really much. As for announcements on gamescom: I have no idea as I'm not following it. But there sure will be some, it just won't be covered by the major news sites.

Germany was always a PC gaming country and I think German developers just missed to jump on the console market so that no developer ever managed to get as big as EA or Ubisoft but they are still very successful on PC. There are also countries which support this industry financially so that it's more convincing to open a studio in these countries if you get money for it from the government. Every country has other industries they support the most. I think I read somewhere that UK supports this industry a lot financially so that it should be easier to have a studio there.

We have obviously some developers but no real big player (well, Koch Media is pretty big as publisher) but no huge ones and since our government is looking at it as if it would be cancer I'm not really surprised.

For fans of Point&Click adventures (like myself), German developers are pretty much the main source for the genre, with studios such as Daedalic Entertainment, Animation Arts, Cranberry production, KING Art Games and Deck 13 to name a few.

And of course, Pirahna Bytes is German developer, fact that, I'm certain, most PC RPG gamers know.

German developers just aren't mainstream.

I think the most well known Spanish game developer was Pyro (Commandos series).
We've had some local PC market filled by Dinamic Multimedia, but they wen't bankrupt.

Recent small developers? I can only think of MercurySteam (Castlevania) and Tequila Works (Rime).
And Zinkia (Pocoyo) makes Pocoyo games xD

I really lked Commandos. It would work well on Wii U.

Good to see that someone mentioned my favorite German developer Daedalic Entertainment (but I doubt that their games can be called commercially successful or the main source for the point and click genre; Daedalic is a small company and I don't think any of their games sold 100.000 copies or more worldwide).

The biggest German developers in terms of retail sales - Blue Byte (The Settlers, Anno co-developer) and Related Design (Anno main developer afaik) - are both owned by Ubisoft. New entries to the franchises Settlers and Anno usually sell several 100.000 copies in the German speaking area alone.

German game developers and publishers seem to be quite successful,these days in an area that's rarely mentioned on VGC: browser games.

This statistic claims to list the world's most successful browser game developers (I doubt it's complete - where are the Asian developers? - but anyway, it at least shows where German developers really succeed these days): http://www.mmofacts.com/top/browser-mmos/developers
The top 6 on this list are German companies afaik, Blue Byte is mentioned on no. 10 with one game (without a doubt Settlers Online), Ubisoft's 7 games on no. 11 also most certainly contain titles which are fully or co-developed by Blue Byte (Ubisoft's Anno, Panzer General. Might & Magic and Silent Hunter Online are all at least co-developed by BB) and I think at least no. 15 is developed by a German company as well.