From a developer point of view, this was a great show for us. The main group of indies demoing (not including the Leftfield collection) are all members of Game Republic, a Yorkshire based Business Development network for indies and more established games studios in The North. They arranged for us to be able to demo at MCM/EGX this weekend, with free exhibition space, which was awesome, as there’s no way we could afford to actually pay to bring our games down here to demo!

I was demoing my game Positron, an arcade inspired racing/puzzle game hybrid, designed to be super accessible and easy to learn (just like an Arcade machine). I had loads of people play the game, and picked up ten sales during the show too (my game is in Steam Early Access). Most of us had someone sat playing our game at all times, so the traffic past the gaming area was decent tbh. I handed out flyers to anyone that played PC games, and people passing by. I also had a Steam Deck set up, allowing me to have two players at once playing my game.

It was lovely to see people enjoying Thingy Paint, and an Elaborate History of Chess either side of me. Their key art on the backing board really attracted people towards the games! Hopefully there are more opportunities for little indies like us to demo our games at shows this big in the future, we usualy don’t have the budget, but I think indie presence at these kind of shows is going to get bigger over the next few years as there are hundreds of great games being developed by smaller indies right now that are finding it super hard to get any sort of exposure.