Barcelona’s IndieDevDay was fantastic, and I wish Canada had something like it

I’ve long been saying that Canada deserves a wider variety of video game shows. While we have several great industry business-to-business (B2B) events like the Montreal International Games Summit (MIGS) and XP Game Summit in Toronto, there isn’t a whole lot for the actual consumer to attend to try out games and hear from the developers who make them. Fan Expo’s various Canadian shows have largely abandoned gaming programming and old cons like the PAX-esque EGLX are gone entirely, leaving only sporadic nascent efforts like Edmonton’s Game Con Canada.

Of course, I totally understand that putting on an event is by no means easy, especially in this economic climate and in a post-COVID world where companies have heavily embraced digital opportunities like streams and downloadable demos to reach their audiences. But on the flip side, Canada is one of the largest producers of games in the world, so it’s always disappointed me that we haven’t consistently had any sort of consumer events to better celebrate our under-appreciated national industry.

All of this was top of mind when I was invited to attend IndieDevDay 2024, an independent games-focused event in Barcelona featuring playable demos, developer panels, networking opportunities and more.

I didn’t quite know what to expect, as I wasn’t familiar with the show and also hadn’t ever been to Spain. But to my pleasant surprise, I was extremely impressed by it all for a variety of reasons. Here’s why I highly recommend IndieDevDay as the perfect event consumers and industry in Europe, as well as a model for potential similar events in Canada.

Welcoming to fans

First — and almost miraculously — is the fact that IndieDevDay is organized by a team of just six people led by Daniel Santigosa. Sure, they had some notable sponsors like Larian Studios (Baldur’s Gate 3), Gameloft (Disney Speedstorm) and prolific indie publisher Devolver Digital (Inscryption from Vancouver’s Daniel Mullins), but if anything, that makes it all the more commendable that a small team has secured such support. All in all, IndieDevDay 2024 — which was the 7th annual show — remarkably welcomed more than 15,000 attendees over a three-day period.

Then there’s the entire structure of IndieDevDay. The first day of the event, the Friday, was dedicated entirely to industry, allowing developers, media, students and the like to more leisurely tour the show floor. Here, around 200 games from local and international developers were playable, as well as representatives from the various teams with whom you could connect. I have a separate piece on my personal favourite demos, but some of the highlights overall include Neva from Barcelona’s own Nomada (the creators of Gris), Hotel Barcelona (from Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro’s Tokyo-based White Owls, Deadly Premonition), Julián Cordero and Sebastian Valbuena’s Despelote and ACE_19111545’s AIKODE.

But even on the second and third days, it never felt overly crowded, especially compared to events I’ve recently attended like Fan Expo Canada, Anime NYC and PAX West with around 100,000 attendees each. It feels like a manageable size both for the venue — La Farga, a large retail and event space in downtown Barcelona — and people looking for a less hectic crowded show. (For context, fellow European show Gamescom, the world’s largest gaming event, just welcomed over 330,000 people to Cologne, Germany in August.) If you want something more laidback than the higher-profile events with 100,000 or more people, IndieDevDay is pretty much the perfect option.

Inspiring to the next generation of developers

Clearly, 15,000 people is enough to show an interest from industry and consumers alike, especially when that’s an increase from the roughly 12,000 from last year. And even anecdotally, it was lovely to see Spaniards enthusiastically turn up to try out games from local teams. Neva, in particular, had a steady line the entire weekend, and the sense of pride for this promising emotional action-adventure game from a homegrown team was palpable. Given the number of talented developers we have in Canada, I would love for our creators to get to taste of that themselves at home. (All the while, a lot of them have strong showings at something like PAX, which is all the way in Seattle.)

Realistically, most of those attendees will come away simply happy to have played an exciting game, whether or not it was locally-made, and that’s still a great form of promotion for developers. In particular, it lets them directly plug the Steam pages for their games through which players can wishlist their titles — a particularly crucial part of indie development. But of course, there are other benefits as well.

Lots of people were interested in the Barcelona-made Neva at IndieDevDay.

In particular, these sorts of events can be game changers for students and up-and-coming developers, whether it’s because they just saw something creatively stimulating or were encouraged by a local team from a similar walk of life. With respect to that latter point, I think back to Quebec City-based Sabotage’s Thierry Boulanger, the creative director of last year’s award-winning Sea of Stars, told the AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook that he didn’t originally think video game development was a viable career option for him in Quebec. It was only after discovering that Ubisoft Montreal’s Prince of Persia: Sands of Time — one of the most beloved games of all time — was made in his province that he was encouraged to make the leap into game dev. At IndieDevDay, that might have been something like Neva for people. In Canada, that could be Sea of Stars or any number of other titles.

And it doesn’t stop there. IndieDevDay had tons of other wonderful programming for nascent developers. For one, there were over 50-plus conferences, panels and workshops, including those from Larian Studios and Gameloft, as well as those from other European developers about the business and craft of games. My personal favourites were one with the magnificent BAFTA-winning Baldur’s Gate 3 composer, Borislav Slavov, and another about the all-too-important cause of game preservation from writer, narrative designer, producer, consultant and fellow Canadian Manda Farough. (I’ll have more on her insightful panel soon in a separate piece.)

Borislav Slavov at IndieDevDay 2024.

Outside of that, IndieDevDay says just over 1,000 business meetings were conducted, which is all the more notable considering over 2,000 attendees were students. What’s more, a job fair was held with 11 companies and approximately 200 candidates, resulting in more than 700 interviews conducted. Factor in the 40 international and local publishers and representatives on the whole coming from 26 different countries, as well as 2,748 live viewers on Twitch to offer some programming for people at home, and you have something that made an impact on a sizeable and far-reaching audience.

The kind of event Canada can hopefully emulate

As mentioned, starting any new gaming event would undoubtedly be challenging, especially nowadays. And of course, it’s easier to talk about IndieDevDay now after it’s had several years to grow. But of course, that success didn’t come over night — that was the result of the passion and commitment of Santigosa’s team and their supporters. Naturally, this was something they built over time.

And so, while IndieDevDay’s 15,000-person scope wouldn’t be feasible for a Canadian event right away, there are certainly takeaways from the Spanish event in terms of its solid mix of industry and fan programming that features both playable demos and panels, workshops and the likes. Realistically, something more the size of TennoCon, the annual London-based Warframe event that had 3,000 people this July, is probably more of a reasonable target.

Ultimately, though, I’m not a business guy, so I certainly won’t sit here and say what can or can’t be done, especially right away. I know getting buy-in from companies can be especially tough. But at the same time, I look at how delightful IndieDevDay was across the board and how it’s put on by six people. I then look at how Canada has such a massive industry with developers who could, in theory, take part in something akin to an IndieDevDay. I think what’s particularly notable here is that the two biggest names at the show, Larian Studios and Gameloft, also have studios in Canada. The former’s Quebec City office contributed to Baldur’s Gate 3, while the latter’s Montreal team works on Disney Dreamlight Valley and the audio for every Gameloft title. That’s to say nothing of the other Canadian studios, be they AAA like BioWare Edmonton (Mass Effect), EA Vancouver (NHL and EA Sports FC), Ubisoft Montreal (Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry) or indies like Oakville, Ontario’s Studio MDHR (Cuphead), Vancouver’s Extremely OK Games (Celeste), and Toronto’s Visai Games (Venba).

It remains to be seen whether something like IndieDevDay will ever come to Canada, but for now, what I can say is that I’m thoroughly impressed by what I saw in Barcelona. From the variety of demos to play and developers to hear from and meet, it’s an outstanding event for anyone with any level of interest in games.

For more on IndieDevDay, check out this Steam page featuring some of the games from the show.

Header image credit: IndieDevDay