State of the games industry events in 2022 - Year in Review
Game Conference Guide Insights - January 2023
Welcome to 2023. I do hope you had lovely holidays and your calendars are slowly filling up with events to attend and possible discover for the first time.
This is the third year of Game Conference Guide. Before we go deep into data and compare them with previous year, I would love to thank each and every one of you who visited the site, read the blog or followed the barrage of events announced on Twitter.
Last year has been breakthrough on all grounds, the continuous growth shattered all my expectations when it comes to number of visitors and readers.
The newsletter since the inception has grown to 1000+ subs, all of them organic without paid ads, which is amazing. It also means there are more eyeballs reading what I like to say. No pressure here.
I would like to thank previous partners, namely: Galaktus, iFairs, EdgeGap, Reboot and Slovak Game Developere Association. With the support from these awesome humans, Game Conference Guide was running without any hiccup, downtime and most importantly function as a free tool to everyone looking for events.
Following the great momentum, I managed to sell all the partnerships for 2023 before it even started, which is mental considering I haven’t promoted the partnerships at all that much. As of now, I am booking partnership slots for 2024. If you are interested, get in touch.
On the other side, Patreon is stagnating, it went from 10 to current 6 Patrons (+2 paid subcribers on Substack), which is disappointing, but I understand, how the internet works. If the information is freely accessible, there aren’t a lot of incentives to pay for what you see. It could have been better, yes, no complaints here, I will keep the Game Conference Guide accessible free of charge on any device.
DID YOU KNOW?
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2022 was very fruitful for the events in general. We have seen the return of much needed IRL gatherings of all sizes after a very depresive period full of insecurities – from hyper local community driven conferences to global powerhouses like gamescom and PAX catering mostly to the general public. You could see the mass adoption of physical first events starting in the second quarter.
The return to physical environment didn’t slow down the virtual showcases and conferences. One third of all of them were happening online (98 from all 291 in 2022). Press conferences attached to E3 and Gamescom gained traction as well, for which a Summer subpage has been created to track their times and dates. All these showcases are now hyperlinked with on-demand version, so you can re-watch the broadcast anytime.
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In 2022 there has been 16 cancelled events, there has been some delays as well and changes to the formats. At first, these changes were answer to loosening the restrictions, changing the format (from virtual to physical) and moving events to Q2 or later date. Even though all of the events adopted very quickly new health guidelines, events like GDC, Gamescom and MagFest were marked as super spreader events.
Most of the movement in the calendar happened due to invasion of Ukraine. I want to give a big shout-out to every event organizer from Ukraine who very quickly moved their teams to safety, found a new territory and successfully organized an event or two. Massive endeavour.
One more observation regarding changing the event format. Last year going back to physical setup was logical and natural shift, while changing virtual only event to physical represented tons of new challenges for the organizers. Last year some of the virtual events didn’t materialize in physical format due to resource heavy production and not enough experience.
On average, 24.5 events (in 2021 it was 26) were announced per month with the biggest amount being announced during Q1 (81 in total with most of them scheduled to happen in 2022). October was the busiest when it comes to announcements, and it is also one of the months with the biggest number of events announced for 2023. Almost 50 events for 2023 were announced between October and December last year. In time of writing, 74 were tracked.
Game Conference Guide in Review: 2022 Edition
Total number of events in 2022: 291 (decrease by 5% from 307)
66% of all of them were physical, compared to nearly 75% virtual last year.
5% (16 out of 291) were cancelled or postponed compared to 3% (10 out of 307 last year.
Most of cancelled events (4) were supposed to happen in October (same as in 2021)
The biggest number of events originated from EU (49%) followed by North America (30%).
Germany contributed with the biggest number of events 26 (34 from UK last year), followed by UK with 24 (last year Germany with 22).
Longest running events in 2022 were: New Zealand Games Festival (16 days) followed by London Games Festival (10 days) and Games Careers Week (10).
Busiest day of 2022 was again in November, 8 events were happening simultaneously on Saturday the 8th. In 2021 it was 17th of November with 10 events.
Median duration of a single event was 2 days (same as last year), average duration was 2,7 days (compared to 3 last year).
If you would have decided to attend every single event in 2022 (except those that were cancelled) it would take you: 554 working days and 210 weekend days. Compared to 689 working days and 214 weekends in 2021.
In total you would be conferencing nonstop for 2 years and then some, 764 days to be exact. It is a decrease by 15% from 2021 with 903 days.
During the 2022, Game Conference Guide has seen:
411 entries in the calendar
You are looking for events mostly during work hours on desktops (66%), the rest is using mobile device to access the website.
Most visitors are coming from:
United States
United Kingdom
Poland
Germany
Netherlands
Followed by Spain, France, Canada, India and Brazil.
Top accessed events were:
GDC
PG Connects London
London Games Festival
Reboot Develop Blue
HG Conf
Followed by Future Games Show by Games Radar, Indie Games Business, Develop Brighton, and DICE.
And that is a wrap. But wait, there is more!
I haven’t touched the ticket prices which brought to light some trends the more I was zooming in on the data I managed to collect. I will cover these in the next newsletter distributed early February. Make sure you are subscribed.
[Game Conference Guide is tracking games industry & game developers events, trade shows, festivals, conferences and events around the world.]
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Pavol Buday, curator @ GCG