Steam strategy festival TactiCon 2023 is returning in May

rockpapershotgun.com:

If you were a fan of last year’s TactiCon, the digital festival highlighting all sorts of strategy games, you might be pleased to learn it's coming back. Organised by Old World publisher Hooded Horse, along with Firesquid, the publisher behind Great Houses Of Calderia, the Steam event will showcase games in every tactical subgenre, and will run between May 11th-15th later this year.

2022’s event featured over 100 games with the usual Steam demos and sales on already released games. There were also around 40 hours of dev streams, who got to play and show off their games, along with plenty of panels discussing the nuts and bolts of creating a strategy game. Hooded Horse and Firesquid say that TactiCon 2022 had over 1.5 million unique visitors on the event’s page and that featured games received an average of 5,000 wishlists from Steam users.

TactiCon is accepting submissions for featured games starting today, and developers have until March 24th to have their games considered at no cost. The festival hosts strategy games from across the globe, from one-person indies to major studio releases, encompassing every subgenre of strategy: deckbuilders, RTS, 4X, city-builders, and anything in between are welcomed. The only restrictions are that games need to either have a playable demo ready for the show or be released in or after May - which includes early access releases. Older strategy games might show up if they have big new updates or expansions incoming, too.

Events that focus on specific genres and niches seem like the ideal way to show off games in the future. E3-type shows are all well and fun, but who really wants to sit through an hour of trailers they're not interested in, just to get a two minute glimpse at