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Fellow Traveller’s LudoNarraCon shows the benefits of a digital future for game conferences
LudoNarraCon shows the benefit of a digital future for conferences
More and more videogame conventions have popped up over the last decade, filling the calendar to the point where we now often see the same demos several times a year. Lately, some publishers and platform holders have begun to forgo conferences such as E3, wondering if they’re really worth the bother. Indeed, while there’s a thrill to the pomp and circumstance of a trade show, there are any number of downsides: certain games don’t demo well on a busy show floor, many conventions are prohibitively expensive for developers and revellers alike, and some are inaccessible for people with certain medical conditions.
LudoNarraCon, held over an extended weekend in mid-May this year, was Australian indie publisher
Fellow Traveller’s alternative celebration of narrativefocused games. It hosted demos and panels with some of the industry’s most prolific game designers on Steam via the storefront’s new native livestreaming technology. At PAX Australia in 2018, managing director Chris Wright and marketing manager Marla Fitzsimmons met with Valve to check it out. “We thought, ‘We like conventions, but are they cost-efficient, time-efficient?’” Wright tells us. “‘How do we do something cool with Steam?’ And what hit was that we could kind of fix both problems in one go. With Steam, maybe we can do it cheaper – and better. We could reach a global audience.” The two sat down and began to list everything they’d usually get out of a convention: media coverage, people playing demos, mailing-list sign-ups and so on. “We started putting numbers against them,
and thinking, ‘If we do this digitally, can we beat these numbers?’ And we were like, ‘Yes, these numbers are really low!’”
The plan was to feature not just games under their own label, but other small teams looking for support. “It was a whole host of work that went into pulling it together and looking at the content,” Fitzsimmons says (indeed, moderating the livestreamed panels and ensuring technical issues were fixed quickly was a full-time job). “But when we actually looked at how we could set it up on Steam, it was really easy. Each exhibitor’s game page became their booth space, and Steam helped us pull that together with a really great event page, where we could have our main panel streams at the top and then feature all of the games.”
Anyone with a computer, phone or tablet and halfdecent Internet connection could tune in – and tune in they did. Over the course of four days, over 870,000 users checked out the LudoNarraCon stream, and the event banners on Steam’s front page garnered around ten to 12 million impressions. Concurrent viewer numbers ranged between 1,500 and 5,000 viewers depending on the panel. The titles featured saw staggering numbers of people checking out their store pages and wishlisting the games (this is key, as on launch day, an email is sent to remind players to pick up the game). They had hoped for 2,000 wishlists on each game, but all received at least 4,000.
And all this without the hassle – and the inevitable flu – that comes with a regular convention. “The initial intention was to try and minimise the load on exhibitors and panellists,” Wright says. “Exhibitors only had two or three hours to do, and then they could loop [their demo], and panellists just had to rock up to their panel and that was it – no travel, no messing around.” For participants such as Kitfox Games director Tanya X Short, it was refreshing. “At PAX, if I’m moderating a panel, I prepare a slideshow that’s everyone’s pictures, their games and their questions,” she says. “It’s 15 slides and is still not a big deal, it’s like an hour’s work. But Fellow Traveller handled that for us.” And the chat system of interaction between speakers and viewers worked well for devs, too. “I kept an eye on the chat and found questions throughout, which is something you can’t really do during a physical panel. You can pick and choose without having to shut someone down publicly. It’s better for those people too, because they feel like they get to say the thing they want to say – as long as it’s not sexist or racist, or whatever.””
Over the course of four days, over 870,000 users checked out the LudoNarraCon stream on Steam
The convention wasn’t without its downsides: there are things that purely digital conferences just can’t offer. “They had a lot of fires on their side where they were like, ‘Install this technology and program’ – and then two days later, ‘No, don’t use that! There’s a bug that’s unsolvable,’” Short says. Meanwhile, there was no reading the crowd. “You can’t get that dynamic of asking people, ‘Raise your hand if you’ve played this game’ so then you know what to address and what not to. It might have been nice to get a better sense of who our audience was.”
The tools to do so are built into Steam’s infrastructure – should other publishers follow Fellow Traveller’s lead, we may well see them put to good use. LudoNarraCon’s is an approach that could help to spotlight games in an increasingly saturated and often inaccessible industry, and might even inspire the bigger players to follow suit.