Indie Arena Booth (IAB), the world’s largest indie game showcase, held its first-ever hybrid event at gamescom 2022 in a massive physical booth and interactive virtual experience featuring more than 130 games from developers across more than 30 different countries, reaching more than a million fans all over the world.
Watch IAB x gamescom 2022 Aftermovie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_tRjSkNT7E
The showcase highlighted 10 world premieres along with never before seen demos. In-person and virtual attendees alike were able to get hands-on via the IAB’s 116-game Steam event reaching more than one million fans and gathering a hefty 600,000 reads. Press and in person event goers were able to demo eight new games in a dedicated Nintendo Switch Area while virtual guests had the opportunity to tour the entire IAB mega booth, look into each individually designed developers’ section, and play demos from the comfort of their own home.
The IAB hosted a 500+ invite-only B2B networking event allowing publishers, press, streamers, and investors to receive exclusive insights from exhibiting developers. The awards show, presented by presenter, producer and Level Up Link Up founder Shay Thompson, and hosted by Super Crowd’s CEO Wolf Lang, recognized indie developers in multiple categories including Best Overall Game, Best Booth, Best Multiplayer Experience, and more. Amongst the winners were Newfangled Games taking home the Accessibility Award for its paper folding puzzle Paper Trail while ustwo games took home the Diversity Award for the upcoming Desta: The Memories Between, and Moonatic Studios took home Best Game for One Last Breath.
A dedicated livestream took place on the IAB’s official Twitch channel featuring streams from worldwide content creators including Strawburry17plays, h0llyLP, Trisha Hershberger, Lara Loft, Frodoapparat, and Dennsen86. Andrea Rene, Co-founder of What’s Good Games, hosted a segment focused on accessibility and diversity, reminding everyone about the importance of inclusivity. The audiences of the IAB’s segments reached over one million live views over the 5 days for a total of 116,100 hours watched.
“Hosting a hybrid gamescom experience that allowed us to reach more than a million people from all over the world is still surreal to us,” said Valentina Birke, Project Director, Indie Arena Booth. “This was our biggest Indie Arena Booth by far when measuring viewership, engagement, and games hosted. We’re only going to expand further from here!”
IAB’s return to Gamescom 2022 would not be possible without the help of its official sponsors and partners including Intel, Twitch, Unity, Valve, Bitburger, Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action , medianet berlinbrandenburg e.V., Mediennetzwerk.NRW, Gamecity Hamburg, Games/Bavaria, nordmedia, and the Catalan Game Association.
For more information, check out the Indie Arena Booth’s official website, meet fellow indie-lovers on Discord, and follow its Twitter, Steam, and Twitch accounts.
