Southeast Asia Games Onward 2024 - Post-mortem
Turning the stake for online showcase dedicated to SEA game developers
Southeast Asia Games Onward 2024 has to be one of my ambitious project dedicating in showcasing games from Southeast Asia. After learning further and feedback from SEA GO 2023, I decided to go further and inviting everyone to be more involved in the project. Anyways that’s the small talk, I don’t know what to add anymore so here’s the point.
Analytics
Participated Games
This year showcase contains 244 games from Southeast Asia game developers. 194 games are coming from selected participants from Google Forms while the 50 games coming from our past gaming event such as Ghost of The SEA 2024, NOVELASIA 2024, and Southeast Asia RPG Maker Showcase 2024. Comparing the numbers to SEA GO 2023, we only have 73 games that were highlighted. The influx of games in SEA GO 2024 is because we open a public form for all game developers to participate in the showcase. Additionally, the reason why during SEA GO 2023 we only invite specific games only is because SEA GO 2023 is my first showcase ever I’ve ever done so I prefer to start things small first and once we have the base foundation, we know how to handle the rest. Nevertheless, we still doing the invitation stuff to game developers. Inviting game developers to SEA GO 2024 is such a bless and also hard because many of their contacts are either not found or not responding.
Looking at the participant form before it got filtered, we got 200 participants filled the form. I’m happy that the games in SEA GO 2024 featured 3x games than SEA GO 2023. However, we have to discard six games from the form. The reason behind the removal is they are not Southeast Asia game developers or claim to be “SEA devs”.
I understand your eager to participate the showcase but keep in mind we have set the boundary we’re only accepting SEA game devs only. This is a showcase exclusive for Southeast Asia games only. So if you’re not one of them, then you’re not eligible.
Unfortunately there is a developer claim to be “Southeast Asia” developers and as we tried finding furhter information there is nothing to support the claim. If you put false identity to be SEA and there’s no concrete evidence of it, then you’re going to put yourself on a target and getting through the blacklist.
Video Showcase
With the success of SEA GO 2023 video showcase, I wanted to kept the vtuber hosting because it’s easier to chroma key and there are lots of Vtubers as well participating the showcase. The production starts on November until December. November is when we done all the renders for host presentation while December is when we stitch together and add designs and cue to the video. Size-wise it’s 51,4 GB for 4k 60 fps video. Additionally, as for the writing of this article the stream has over than 1,426 views.
One of my favorite segment to edit is Brunei segment because it’s easy to edit while my least favorite is Indonesia because there are tons of games coming from Indonesia and it takes a moment to compile the trailers together. Some trailers were cut from the final presentation because time constraint so I’m worried if people disinterested halfway through the stream. Like there’s a trailer for over 12 minutes long so there’s no way I have to put 12 minutes trailer showcase that puts all the game trailer into the ground.
Steam & Itch.io Page
The steam page for SEA GO 2024 until the showcase gained around 1,516,203 impressions and 22,315 reads. Compared to 2023 we got lowest impressions which I think I can guess because lack of promotion that still a problem I have to tackle. So for the future, I know that steam event is one of the most important aspect we have to look because it can surpassingly boost wishlists for certain games.
Speaking of boost the itch.io page gain for some views only and from one of the answer from SEA GO 2024 survey, they said that they prefer to see games from Steam sale only. Now the question that someone might ask is…would Itch.io page will be removed in the future? on the bright side is no, we still going to keep making the collection for next event but based on the survey’s answer we know that if you’re lookin for wishlist then Itch.io page will not be very effective. From my perspective, it’s better if you have the page AND the game released on Itch.io so the algorithm can gets to your feet.
Host, Medias and Gaming Associations
I have tried contacting over 41 gaming medias and 8 gaming associations. Sadly there’s only 5 gaming media I can able to confirm however it seems that there are more outside of the people I have contacted. As for gaming association, the line up are the same however two associations did not able to confirm, but we can try to invite them again in the future. Both medias and associations are very collaborative and helpful to us as they helping us on promoting the Steam Page a lot. Hosts-wise we got 10 hosts participating Southeast Asia Games Onward 2024 which is twice the size than SEA GO 2023. Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Philippines are easy one to invite because they filled the host invitation form. However, Singapore is the hardest because we couldn’t find any until Abel Valentino came in (so to Abel, thank you so much for hosting Singapore segment). Prior making host invitation, I already tried inviting group vtubers such as The Cham Drinkers, Project ARP from Thailand and Project: Livium that was recommended by Valentino Ringo.
For Thailand host, it all came from Bit Egg inc. suggesting me to invite ARP to the showcase and they can also speak english too. Next thing I did is contact the manager and they are interested in the project. Unfortunately I never able get another response for the confirmation so that’s when I have sirens blaring in my mind thinking “oh no, there’s no Thailand host, what do I do???”. Thankfully Xsi from Vermillion Digital and Kumpalit from PlayPrime suggested me to invite Nergal Near and Hasegawa Aika (she already followed my twitter so I shoot a dm for invitation).
Conclusion
It’s been 2 years since 2022 I have made an account dedicated to showcasing games from Southeast Asia and raise hundreds to thousands followers. I always think realistically so when I made the account for the first time I know it’s gonna be huge for SEA because there is no gimmick account dedicated in showcasing games from Southeast Asia. My inspiration on the account is coming from Obscure Games Aesthetic (as for writing this article, the account is inactive from twitter) and Horror Games Community (formerly Horror Games Aesthetics). Now for thousands of followers and still a gimmick account covering video games from Southeast Asia I still do this on my own. Additionally, a lot of my friends also said that SEAGamethetic is like one of those urban legends from SEA Game dev industry because no one knows who run it lol. I don’t what to add anymore so we’ll get to closing words that I still very remember during IGDX 2023 when hearing Eka from Mojiken Studio saying “Be nice to others”. What I’m trying to say is don’t try to be rude between others and you must always maintain your good reputation as you are getting more recognized.