Taipei Game Show 2017, was it worth going to?
First of all I’d like to say how much 2016 brought to us. Tons of new friends being built as well as getting our name more out there.
Go to the bottom of the blog for the conclusion.
So back to the regular topic of this blog, the Taipei Game Show. How was it? Was it worth spending the money we had little of to go there? Let me tell you about our experience there.
It was late 2016 around November or December where we were invited to showcase for Taipei Game Show. We knew that there was a few if not a couple of Filipino developers going to the event and this would be an opportunity for us to meet people and get to see how the market in Taiwan would react to the game. So, we were pretty much excited.
Taipei Game Show had 2 specific events for Indies, the Indie Game Festa, which was a B2B event where the audience would generally be people from the industry or related to it. Next was the Indie House which was a B2C event where the place was open to everyone.
We were invited for the Indie Game Festa (B2B) which was on the 19th to 20th, but an ingress of the 18th was available for us plus it was FREE. Starting December, I had to prepare my Visa for Taiwan as well as the Marketing Materials for it. We viewed a problem right there which was the language, not saying that everyone there doesn’t understand English but we ourselves did not understand Mandarin and the culture there. Luckily we had friends from China who suggested that we send our marketing materials and they’d be the one to localize the texts themselves, THIS WAS A TOTAL LIFE SAVER. We couldn’t be more thankful for that and I’ll introduce them at a later blog as they deserve their own post.
By January 13th my Visa came through but this was one heck of a close call for me as I generally expected it to come through before January. If you’ve ever traveled to Korea, Japan, US, Europe or any 1st world country you’d probably have an easier time getting a Visa for Taiwan and If you’ve traveled there recently you’d be eligible to apply for an Online Visa.
We left Philippines on the 17th of January by 10 PM with the general delayed flight of an hour and arrived by 1 or 2 AM at Taiwan. Upon arriving we had no clue on how to go there as we weren’t provided in depth instructions on what to take specifically, so we took a taxi straight to the hotel where we arrived by 3 AM. Upon heading up to the reception of AT Boutique hotel , the hotel sponsored by the show for us, we were told that the check in time was 3 PM on that same day. We were told that we could’ve checked in any time on the 18th, we were tired and our bags were heavy so it was an unexpected cause for spending as we had to pay NTD 3000.00 for the early check in. Upon arrival in our room, we were greeted by this 3 AM view of the city and by golly was it beautiful the room too.
Awesome right?
So we did a bit of an early morning exploration for some food since we didn’t eat dinner in the Philippines. Family Mart was open and these convenience stores are always a life saver in other countries (Heck even 7–11s are everywhere). The food was great especially the flan:
The hotel provided us free breakfast from 6 AM to 9 AM, unfortunately due to our late night hyped up mode we woke up by 9 AM (rather I woke up and had to wake up the Dev guy). We did some early morning exploration as ingress for the Indie Game Festa starts by 2 PM that same day.
By ingress time we arrived at the venue but our materials from our friends haven’t arrived yet so we chatted up the devs there and made friends. The booth wasn’t big, you could say it was enough for small team. Later that evening we had a meetup with other developers for dinner which was great. So let’s skip to the next day cause I want to post the image of the glorious poster and stuff we had for the event.
The start of the event on the 19th was at 10 AM, we had time to prepare and get ready. I left by myself to get started as my roomie was still sleeping~. Upon arriving, I’ll introduce them now, Another Indie Studio, our friends from China had already set the booth up and it was baffling how much I loved it.
The booth itself was humble but it had these amazing poster and flyers, the only thing which we just noticed that we failed to prepare was the localization of the Clues which we printed. We could’ve rented hardware or monitors but that would’ve cost us money which we had very little of after spending most of our money on the hotel room.
The event started off small with few people playing here and there, it was mostly just the other developers trying out the games and providing comments which is always amazing and helpful. Building friendship while building games, this is why I can never get tired of the indie community.
The event itself had tons of publishers but they were generally focused on the mobile platform, we were approached by some as well but mobile wasn’t something we planned to do as of that moment and even now. Organizers from different international events were there as well, BIC Fest from Korea as well as ESGS Philippines were there inviting people. Oh! head on to the Philippines on October for ESGS, we’ll be glad to meet people and show you around!
After the 1st day, we were all invited for TGS Night where in we get to meet with awesome people with FREE drinks and dig in some FREE finger food (I emphasize the FREE cause who can never say no to FREE). It was great and if you need something that would represent that night just have a gander at this:
The last day was generally the same but the convention hall was open to the public and there was a massive surge of people, most of whom were for the main hall but some of them did go to the Indie Game Festa.
We were also invited later that evening for another party and this was a meet and greet one kind-of. We weren’t invited for the B2C the following day so we made plans to explore Taipei by visiting the Spirited Away village.
In Conclusion:
The Taipei Game Show 2017 was awesome. I know not being able to showcase for the B2C was sad but we didn’t have enough money to stay that long either. The B2B event itself was for you to get your game into the Chinese Market, if it fit their standards people or publishers would come flocking to the game especially if you’re a mobile games developer.
If you’re into developing games for mobile, I’d recommend you apply for TGS 2018 next year as we’d love to come back as well (I loved the cold weather there). Only important things to remember are get LOCALIZATION a priority and TALK.
The food, people, and experience make the event really worth it.
