What is the Indie Craft K-Game Festival?

INDIE CRAFT is a Korean open competition for indie game makers with the key purpose of helping the indie game scene grow and contribute to a healthier ecosystem in the gaming industry.

The history of the indie game festival

South Korea has always been a huge part of the gaming industry, especially since the esports boom. Korean game studios caught the attention of the world when games like Player Unknown Battle Ground developed by Bluehole began standing out.

The record-breaking numbers done by PUBG inspired other studios to take part in this growing trend and display their fervour by making something unique as well. With this rise in passion and new talent, domestic Korean developers needed a way to get public attention. Seongnam City and Seongnam Industry Promotion Agency spotted that gap and launched a platform to give indie creators exposure and support the growth of Korea's game industry.

After getting in touch with the local gaming community, Seongnam City held the first IndieCraft K-game festival in 2017. The event was loved by both investors and local studios and played an important part in taking these small indie creators to the next level.

Initially, the Indie Craft festival started as an offline event where they got the creators together with some veteran developers alongside some bigger studios. The event became a hit in Seongnam City and was consecutively held until 2020 in March.

Seongnam Industry Promotion had plans for 2021 as well but with Covid-19 blowing up, holding an offline event was simply out of the question. The event management initially planned to cancel, but community support pushed them to go online in 2021. The change stuck: for two consecutive years, 20,000 people attended the online Korean indie game festival.

The future of the game festival

In 2019, the Seongnam Industry Promotion Agency signed to co-host Indie Craft with the Korean Mobile Game Association and this partnership led to Indie Craft being held on the metaverse for the first time in 2022.

The metaverse switch was massive for Indie Craft as it expanded their reach and also allowed indie developers all over the world to take part in the event and showcase their skills. It attracted 23 cooperative organisations from 15 countries, inviting overseas developers and having 30,000 people attend it that year.

Alongside the global participation of developers in 2022, Indie Craft also started working to promote a selected few developers globally so they could get mentorship and international exposure.

Indie Craft also started to take care of media for the selected teams as bad promotion was keeping a lot of local indie games from reaching the right audience despite being fun.

The latest Indie Craft game festival was held on July 22-24th, 2023 and it was by far the biggest event up until now. In 2022, over 70 exhibitors, Twitch streamers, and influencers took part. 2023 pushed further: over 80 games were submitted both globally and locally.

In 2023, Indie Craft announced 500 million won in developer support, up from 400 million the year before. With COVID no longer a barrier, Indie Craft 2023 ran both offline and online, splitting B2B and B2C conferences across separate dates.

During B2B days, devs were allowed to arrange meetings with investors and big studios through MeetToMatch while B2C days were reserved for showcasing work to the public. This format allowed developers to present their games in front of potential investors as well as reach out to their future audience to build rapport and generate public awareness.

The latest Indie Craft was also the best one yet when it came to the quality of games as this year the competition was the toughest it's ever been. This time a total of 5 games were chosen to be a part of Indie Craft where The Devil Within: SATGAT came out on top.

This year's (Indie Craft K-game Festival) was a success and already, both the Seongnam Industry Promotion Agency and Korea Mobile Game Association are looking forward to holding the next event in 2024.