Fellow Traveller: "It's a lot easier to start a publisher than to sustain one"

gamesindustry.biz:

LudoNarraCon has become a staple among games industry events, and is poised to return in 2024, from May 9 to 13, with applications to exhibit or speak at the show now open until December 8, organiser Fellow Traveller announced today.

The event celebrated its fifth anniversary earlier this year, which Fellow Traveller founder Chris Wright says is "kind of wild" to the team.

"[It's been a] really good year," he tells us. "We had more support from Steam, more featuring support on the front page. I think we had 30% or 40% more traffic than we'd had in previous years – all the numbers [went] up, all the devs [were] very happy. I think we're just established now. We had like 500, 600 applications for the 50 places. The hardest job is not convincing people to take part (which is what it was the first year or two); now it's, how do we narrow this down to a small number?"

Only featuring a small number of devs as part of the narrative-focused festival is an important aspect, Wright says, due to the sheer amount of other events taking place throughout the year.

"There's a limit of attention with digital festivals, unfortunately," he says. "Some of them have got like 2,000 games in, some have like 600 or 700, some have 150 or so. What we try to do is keep it tight, which means some people can't participate, but the ones that are in know they are going to get a spotlight shined on them.

"Part of the original thesis of the event was narrative games struggle at physical events, [so] we needed to find a way to shine a spotlight on them outside of competing with those games that get all the attention. We didn't want to move it into the digital space then flood it with content and have the same problem. It's gone really well."

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