Taking place April 24 thru 27, LudoNarraCon was a smashing success for the Fellow Traveller team and all involved
MELBOURNE, Australia – May 19th, 2020 — Indie games label Fellow Traveller held their 2nd annual LudoNarraCon at the tail end of April, and today they’re beyond happy to report the event was a rousing success. Building on the accomplishments of the 2019 event, LudoNarraCon 2020 aired live on Steam as a global digital festival celebrating narrative video games with a roster of independent games, playable demos, and thoughtful panels featuring many industry veterans.
In 2019 when the inaugural LudoNarraCon took place, Fellow Traveller put stock in the fact that digital events would be the way of the future. It was impossible to predict, but as the number of digital-focused events increases in the wake of the current COVID-19 pandemic, Fellow Traveller was proud to provide one of the foremost opportunities for indie developers to showcase their games to the world. If you missed out on the event, you can catch up on many of the panels on Fellow Traveller’s YouTube channel.
This year’s event saw 940,000 unique attendees direct to the event page, up from 2019’s 850K, with participants seeing approximately 20K visitors each to their individual store pages which is impressive in its own right as LudoNarraCon 2020 featured more than twice the number of exhibitors as last year. Other interesting stats include:
- Unreleased games saw an average of 3K wishlists during the event.
- 42 devs exhibited games with content coming in from around the world: Australia, Germany, Japan, Venezuela, Indonesia, Canada, UK, USA, and more!
- 14 panels, ran live and looped afterward, saw concurrent viewers of 3000 up to near 5000 attendees at a time, absolutely dwarfing the abilities for physical attendance to a panel at most events. Total unique viewers of 1.4 million across all viewing platforms.
- Event banners on Steam received over 61 million impressions – a big increase on 2019’s 13.5 million impressions – highlighting the platform as an ideal host for digital events.
- Demos averaged 4624 activations across games with an average of 2K actual players over the period they were available.
- Global reach in a way no physical event could be! The top three attendee locations after the US were China, Russia, and Brazil.
Fellow Traveller plan to build even further on this year’s massive success as they already begin planning LudoNarraCon’s 2021 edition. Spearheaded by a mission to give unique narrative titles from devs and publishers around the world their moment to shine, LudoNarraCon 2021 is sure to impress when it makes its third appearance.
About LudoNarraCon 2020
LudoNarraCon is a digital games festival celebrating narrative games and the people that make them. Organised by indie games label, Fellow Traveller, it all takes place on Steam and replicates many of the aspects of physical game conventions such as PAX or Eurogamer Expo.
Here’s how it works:
- A curated selection of developers “exhibit” on their Steam store pages, using Steam’s streaming features to provide behind the scenes looks at their games. Some also provide downloadable demos, available only for the duration of the event but playable at the player’s convenience.
- A “theatre” stream features panels on topics related to narrative games and panelists including narrative game developers, writers, and journalists.
- All of the live streaming content is looped for the rest of the event, making it easy to access the content when it suits the attendee.
- A sale featuring more than 50 narrative games runs for the duration of the event.
- Media can register for a press pass, giving them early access to demo builds, press assets and facilitating contact with participating developers to organise interviews.
- Attendees can connect with each other via stream chat, Steam forums or the Fellow Traveller Discord.
- Steam brings the whole event together in a special event page on the store making it easy to find all the content. Steam also puts the event in front of millions of Steam users via promotion and exposure on the store.
