Ahoy mateys, welcome Below Deck!
Tepene and I just got back from a whirlwind trip to Germany. Thirty hours of travel, four nights in Cologne, and then straight back again. We’re tired. Our feet hurt from being on our toes non-stop working the booth at Gamescom, and our backs hurt from sitting through the long haul flights. Despite all this, we’re absolutely buzzing from the event.
It was a real “pinch-me” moment being there alongside the very best of the NZ games industry, and amongst 80,000+ developers from around the world. Before leaving on Friday we also got to catch a glimpse of the 300,000 game consumers and fans descending upon Cologne to immerse themselves in their favourite IPs and discover new games.
In this edition of Below Deck I’ll share some pictures and stories from our first Gamescom experience!
Yours piratically,
Ben
Davy Jones’ Deckhand at the New Zealand Pavilion at Gamescom
NZTE and CODE NZ put together an impressive display for the many kiwi games travelling to Germany.
The Cass Bay Games booth
Tepene came equipped with some beautiful, impactful details that really made our booth stand out. It was a great place to test out some of his genius ideas ahead of our next showcase at PAX Australia in October. These items included an old map, books, keys, and a tiny wooden chest for business cards.
Representing Games pitching event
The day after we arrived, Ben pitched the game to a room full of publishers as part of an event hosted by Representing Games. He dressed appropriately.
Our Gamescom experience
LEFT: Ben at the booth. RIGHT: Tep at the NZTE Networking Mixer.
LEFT: Sharing the game with NZ’s Ambassador to Germany, Craig Hawke. CENTRE: Ben pitching. RIGHT: Tep at the booth.
Context:
We were located in the business area in Hall 3.2 which was for trade passes only.
We had a silver tier package and were part of the New Zealand NZTE pavilion.
We've never done this before...
Highlights:
Presenting a pitch in a session run by Representing Games meant we were able to get in front of lots of publishers, even those who had rejected in-person meeting requests.
With a silver tier booth we had lots of drop-ins, including some publishers we got to pitch our game to, and we had so many people stop by to play (and LOVE) the game!
We met amazing developers from all around the world and got to hear many inspiring stories of success.
Every publisher we pitched wanted follow up and Steam keys to share the demo with their team.
Challenges:
We received many rejections to our meeting requests via Meet To Match (a meetings booking app specifically for games events) and ended up with just 3 publisher meetings booked ahead of arrival. This was somewhat discouraging, but we were very pleased to pull together 3 more pitch meetings while we were there, and they all felt really positive.
The phrase "Roguelike deckbuilder" sometimes felt like it was met with a bit of resistance. There certainly seems to be some exhaustion around the genre in the publishing space. We had to really hone how we communicated our points of difference (namely our open world exploration elements and counter-attack system). On the flipside though, we met many, many people who came to play the demo and express how much they adore the genre and just had an overall awesome time with our game.
We were approached by a lot of service providers with a pretty hard-sell attitude, several trying to convince us to change the design of our game to be more mobile focused or other such madness... we had to practice giving a polite ‘no thank you’!
Was it worth it?
While we had hoped to book more publisher meetings ahead of time, especially with the huge 30+ hour journey from New Zealand, really it just takes one publisher that's a good fit and we could be set for the next phase of our journey. We will be following up and reaching out to others who weren't at Gamescom. The experience itself was an absolute blast, especially being surrounded by our New Zealand game dev peers! We also came away with some valuable insights to work into our next showcase build for PAX AU.
Join the crew!
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Until next time me hearties, yo ho!
