There are more and more events every year dedicated to video games. Navigating through the annual schedule is getting increasingly complex, and we have many discussions with our different partners about the merits of the different events for them to attend, depending on the profile of their games, the current state of development of the projects, and the company’s long term goals.
I spend a fair amount of time at these events for our own reasons, and I have been toying with the idea of a guide for anyone feeling a bit lost on the topic. This blog post is the first attempt at such a guide. The idea is not to tell you which events to attend, mostly because there is not one size fits all answer to this question, but to breakdown what roles these events play in the life of a game, and of a studio.
The other important component is the idea of an event id card (I sometimes call them events stats blocks, because of reasons) – a single-image summary of what an event is about (a two- or three- images summary for those events that have fundamentally different components to them), and what it is good for, hopefully helping you decide which are the ones you should definitely attend.
The blog post is very much structured as a guide to understand these event id cards, explaining the different parts and helping you decide what matters the most to you, your project and business when attending an event, along with a first batch of cards for the main industry events.
Events ID cards explained
The event id cards are broken into the following components:
Name of the event.
Usual time of the year it happens (the month).
Location (city, country).
Type of audience. Whether this is a professional event (B2B – Business to Business), or a public event (B2C – Business to Consumer). Events with both components will get an id card for each of them. More details below.
Nature of the event. What the event is. I will go in more details about each category you can find here. I will also go into detail on each possible option later on.
Event Size. General information about the duration of the event and its size.
Goals. What is the usual motivation to attend the event. I will also go into detail on each factor.
Description. Don’t expect any lengthy text here. It is mostly to provide context.
Cost to attend. These are bare minimum costs and don’t go take into consideration travel and lodging. I think this is important to have, but take this with a massive grain of salt and DO NOT use it for budgeting purposes. Always build your budget using actual pricing information from the organizers.
Event ID card for the GDC
Types of audience
The most basic categorisation of events is based on what type of audience it is intended for. This quite simple, as there are two possibilities:
Public events are intended to be for anyone who cares to attend. They are not necessarily free, but there is an understanding that anyone can go there and the content is aimed at the general public. These are also referred to as B2C events (Business to Consumers) and they can be conventions, exhibitions, or even conferences. Most often these have a showfloor where you can exhibit your game to the general public.
Professional events are intended for professionals (or would-be professionals) of the game industry. They are also referred to as B2B (Business to Business events), and there is a huge variety of them.
Of course, some events have both public and professional components – gamescom for instance has an area dedicated to professionals and closed to the public, while most of the space is taken up by booths showcasing games for the public.
In those cases, I will make an event id card for each side of the event.
Nature of the events
This is what will tell you what actually happens at the event. Many events have different types of activities and related content, so expect to see multiple categories to match a single event.
Conference. You have speakers, and maybe round tables, sometimes you sit down in the audience and listen, and other times you contribute to the discussions.
But mostly, you have someone telling you things, you listen to them, and you learn something.Show Floor. You have a space, more or less a large one, where exhibitors have set up booths to present their products. Show floors for Public Events will more likely be about showcasing games that are not out yet, and for the public to discover them ahead of their friends. Show Floors for Professional events can be a mix of showcasing games, presenting new technologies, trying to sell developers the latest ad-technology to maximize users acquisition. Here you will also sometimes find recruitment booths. Certain events have huge dedicated spaces for recruiting activities.
Networking. The event is set up so that it is easy for meetings to take place. There might be meeting tables, meeting points, and the event may offer a matchmaking service to make it easier for you to find the type of person you want to meet.
Awards. The event includes an award ceremony. Some are more sophisticated than others. These range from taking over a conference room when the time comes to announce the winners, to a full-on dinner party with a host and entertainment around the awards announcements themselves.
Competition. These are esports events – competitions organised around a number of video games. Generally, they will be Public Events.
Most of the events I will cover are mainly of the first three types – the vast majority of events relevant to professionals of the game industry would have at least on those component at the heart of what they offer.
Goals
Why do you attend events?
What is it you want to achieve by attending?
These might seem obvious questions, but there are many studios and developers that are attending events, spending significant amounts of money and time, just because they feel that’s what is expected of them, and attending this event or another is what they should do, without going through the process of mapping out what they want out of attending them.
Here are the most common discussed motivations to attend events when working with games studios and publishers:
