Will Attending Events Help Me Sell More Games?
Definitely not. Also yes. Maybe.
Game devs delight in arguing about conferences and events: they’re either critical for developing your career or a useless indulgence that distracts from the One True Task of coding. Startup grindset weirdos also love to go on about how surely you’d “rather be building”.
Events are the very definition of “your mileage may vary”: their costs and benefits are hugely dependent on your personality, the specifics of your business, the nature of your game and your personal situation.
Disambiguation
We do love our conflation in games. With events, people are usually cross-talking about the value of:
- Public demos
- Press demos
- Funder demos
- Talks and sessions
- Socialising
All of these can be profoundly valuable at different times but that value is variable and the precise times are tricky to define.
I would suggest that a brute force valuation approach - does event attendance correlate directly to more games sold in the following month - is pretty much always destined to fail. So what’s a more helpful way to think about all this?
Snowy Owls
We’ve heard about highly unpredictable high-impact Black Swans for years but what about somewhat unpredictable mid-impact events? I’m going to call these Snowy Owls primarily because owls are cool.
For most devs, the main reason to attend an event should be to encourage Snowy Owls. You might stand next to someone in line to get your conference pass who becomes a great friend and collaborator. You might hear a single point in a talk that makes a fundamental difference to your game design. You might chat to someone who is looking to invest in exactly the kind of company you are building. There are thousands of tiny possibilities like this which start exploding out of control as soon as you transport your tired skeleton inside its meat vehicle to a brand new place to meet other fleshly travellers: this matrix of serendipity simply cannot be replicated on the computer.
Nobody is immune to the beneficence of the Snowy Owl: you can be the hairiest cave dwelling coder in the world and still accidentally cause something great to happen simply because you emerged blinking into the harsh light of community. Those people who seem to just know everyone often achieved that status via random encounters at events.
This is a bit tough to process if you’re hyper literal about returns on your time or only interested in 100% guaranteed outcomes from your decisions: I humbly submit that this may not be the most effective way to go through life.
Network Infrastructure
“Networking” sucks and nobody should engage in it. As a term, it originates from a kind of Dilbert World 1980’s corpo dialect that is best abandoned.
Instead of walking around with an agenda and trying to rate people based on their utility to you personally, if you keep an open mind and chat to everyone in a straightforward way then you will automatically start getting value out of events. It is extremely easy to rot in your digital silo as a game developer: even the smallest amount of normal human interaction with people who share your interests can be hugely beneficial. And yes, it might well lead to improvements in your business that will pay off down the line.
I think many devs tie themselves in knots with this stuff, either believing it to be cynical in some way or else deciding that you need some kind of elaborate flowchart to engage in it at all. Of course socialising isn’t easy for everyone, so it’s about finding a natural way of doing it which suits you: then you’ll start to see the benefits.
A tip if you’re British or from another similarly reserved nation: don’t be afraid to just go up and introduce yourself to someone you think would be interesting to chat to. If you’re more anxious or concerned with status, you might struggle with this but it’s worth learning to overcome those issues.
“If I wanted to hang out with friends I’d just go on holiday”: this is a potentially valid argument usually deployed by people who never actually do go on holiday. Don’t listen to them!
Demo Mode
Public demos at shows are not good for selling more games: I have seen many people in the past startled that their Steam sales graph hasn’t notched up after a strong performance on the show floor.
My feelings on booths are mixed: if you are starting out from scratch it can be a great exercise to just get your game in front of actual humans and then experience the entire ensuing disaster first hand; however, if you are doing observed or in-person playtesting elsewhere (and you should be) I’m not sure the upside is quite there.
It can be useful to have a focal point at a show to bring publishers and journalists but again you can organise this yourself outside of the booth ecosystem, which can be expensive and will definitely eat a huge amount of your time.
In-person publisher demos and meetings have become a bit more contentious due to the prevalence of platforms like Meet2Match and the sheer demand on scouts’ time. That’s not to say you shouldn’t still give it a go - especially in cases where final arbiters (such as founders or senior folks at publishers) might be present. Multiple points of contact still matter: putting a face to the name in an inbox can make a lot of difference.
Push to Talk
A lot of game dev talks and panels are terrible; some are brilliantly inspiring - it can be quite hard to tell them apart in advance.
Event organisers have tried various ways to combat this in the past but ultimately it is down to those who are speaking to provide real value, whether that be entertainment, education or a combination of the two. As such, attendance is always optional and it’s worth seeing out speakers who have a real track record, or who might have a unique experience you want to tap into.
YouTube has also made the value of live talks more uncertain, especially as many game dev speakers are less than compelling. When I speak, I try to make sure it’s original content delivered in a way that specifically suits a live format - I think as an industry we should move away from slides and demos that would be better in an online medium and towards something more immediate when it comes to on-stage presentations.
Talks provide a unique opportunity for focus in our modern attention economy: no phones, no movies on in the background, no weird people knocking on your door asking to view your flat even though there isn’t a viewing booked today. This is something we should be capitalising on more.
Should I Go?
There is no universe in which you must attend events in order to have a successful product launch, game dev career or life in general. It’s been shown time and time again that you can do just fine without them. Sometimes, it’s good to slow down and focus for a while - you can always pop your head up again later.
You may also have personal reasons for choosing not to attend specific events or travel to a particular location: that is obviously fine. Barriers like cost and cultural hostility limit options for far too many developers - event organisers should continue their work to break these down.
But if you are lucky enough to be able to travel and if you are comfortable with the idea of variable rewards over variable timeframes (and as a game developer...you probably should be) then it is worth taking a look at your opportunities, especially early on in your career. You might get more direct bang for your buck paying for advertising or adding features to your game but your experience of your overall gamedev journey might well suffer - I always feel a twinge of sadness when I see a dev no-show for an awards ceremony or skip out on interacting with others in the industry at a time when they are the big new thing. Those opportunities don’t come around very often and even if you think you might not enjoy them, I’d recommend pushing yourself to give them a try.
I’ve made lifelong friends and met colleagues, connected with some people whose work has inspired me and learned things which I still apply today due to events through the years. Seeing Mike Morhaime speak in Austin and getting to shake his hand afterwards at the start of my career had a huge impact on me; I learned an unbelievable number of things about indie gamedev business from Cliff Harris and other friends that I met at the first Gamecity event in Nottingham…the list is endless for me.
Sometimes having a reason to go to a place you might never visit otherwise can be a thrilling and life-affirming experience. Sometimes I’ve been bored out of my mind and stressed out by being away from my desk for too long: so it goes.
Life is comprised of events so it should be no surprise that they are a mixed bag - maybe I’ll see you at the next one.
Loads of great points here. So difficult to judge if it is something that is going to be beneficial, and given the increase in the number of events every year, I fear that the access to community and opportunity will become increasingly difficult to keep up with for serious and full time suppliers/composers.
Alas, you have to roll the dice in order to play the game, so the more you can roll, the more likely those random but important positives come out of it. I had not thought of it that way until reading this!