Although PAX West has significantly scaled down in Seattle this year due to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, indie game developers who came to the Expo to show off their games still consider the experience to be a success.
The main exhibition hall of PAX West is a bit shadowy compared to its usual huge booths, huge screens and sensory overload spectacle. The show still uses the PAX name, but it definitely feels like a completely different convention.
To understand what it looks like from a game developer’s perspective, we interviewed Fredwood, Who is showing off His upcoming game LOVE 3 In this weekend’s show.
“It is impossible to have any reasonable expectations for PAX a year and a half after the pandemic, so I would say that they are cautiously very low,” Wood said. “However, I am surprised that there are so few exhibitors here this year.”
I’m really nervous to travel and be with so many people #PAXWest, But now (for me) is over, I will miss the energy of the crowd.
Although it is small, this is one of my favorite PAX.
-Fred Wood @ PAX West (Booth #1613) (@thatsmytrunks) September 6, 2021
The last meeting Wood attended was PAX East in Boston in late February 2020, just before most of the world was closed due to COVID-19. After such a long break from interacting with gamers, Wood is happy to be able to participate in PAX West from San Antonio to Seattle, although he knows it will be very different from usual.
Part of the reason why PAX West’s showrooms are so scarce this year is the almost complete lack of “big” game developers like Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Ubisoft. But even the independent existence is very low-key.Typical small game developers from overseas did not participate in this trip, and PAX West’s main products Standalone MEGABOOTH is still closed, So a large number of independent games they brought have disappeared.
However, for independent developers like Wood, all of this has proven to be relatively good news.
“The result of the reduction in PAX West exhibitors this year is that attendees are hungry for games, and this year they can actually see everything,” Wood explained. “This also means that, as a smaller developer, we can get an excellent location on the Expo Hall floor, close to the sky bridge and a main entrance.”
After the show, Wood plans to go home and isolate for a few weeks, while preparing for the next game and preparing to launch Love 3 Later this year. All in all, he thought the show was a success, and shared on Twitter, “This is one of my favorite PAX.”