Hello, fellow travelers on the path of gaming, and all our friends who play games!
With a typhoon approaching, I hope everyone is staying safe. Because of the storm, Saturday's activities at Bahamut's 30th Anniversary Gathering had to be canceled. Fortunately, Sunday's event went ahead, and we even received plenty of generous support from our big brother Bahamut. I'm sincerely grateful.
We put a lot of work into preparing for that day—and for all these exhibitions. Now, sitting in a café after the fact and watching the rain outside, I find the experience bittersweet in more ways than one.
Traveling from show to show this year felt like fighting one storm after another, sometimes literally. When things go wrong often enough, the initial disappointment and speechlessness gradually give way to a kind of calm that's so absurd you can't help laughing.
Every time I go to an exhibition, trouble follows. Well, there's a reason I'm the Cat of Bad Luck!
Since the typhoon and holiday have given me a rare chance to sit down with a coffee and write, let's talk about the results and mishaps of our exhibitions at home and abroad.
I'll be covering four events:
• gamescom latam 2026, Brazil — represented remotely through a third party at no cost.
• Busan Indie Connect Festival 2026, South Korea — attended in person with assistance from Taipei Game Show.
• gamescom 2026, Germany — paid remote representation through a third party.
• TOKYO GAME SHOW 2026, Japan — largely organized by ourselves, with assistance from Taiwan's trade promotion organization.
1. Brazil — gamescom latam 2026
Format: Remote exhibition, assisted by Taipei Game Show.
Cost: NTD 0.
Wishlists: Approximately 300, counting the week before and the week after the show.
Preparation: Virtually nothing beyond basic information and a press kit.
The numbers from this remote exhibition were a pleasant surprise. But participating in this kind of event is almost like drawing a lottery ticket twice: first, you don't know whether you'll be selected; second, you don't know how effective the exhibition itself will be.
From booth setup to publicity, we barely handled anything. After handing our press kit to the Taipei Game Show team, we were like babies sucking on pacifiers while the grown-ups took care of everything.
We happily accepted those 300 wishlists, but we had almost no idea where they came from. We could tell that about half the players were from Latin American or Spanish-speaking regions, around a quarter were English-speaking, and the remaining quarter used other languages. But we couldn't reliably distinguish on-site traffic from online exposure.
In other words, the lesson from this exhibition serves mainly as the opening point of this article: the less directly involved you are, the less firsthand experience you can take away.
There was, however, one mishap worth mentioning. On the first day, the gamescom latam organizers forgot to include our game on the event's Steam sale page, costing us that day's exposure. Thankfully, Taipei Game Show helped communicate with the organizers, and we were included for the remainder of the event. Even with that handicap, we gained around 300 wishlists. I can't help thinking the final number might have been higher.
A note about press kits:
Ours includes a playable demo, trailer, two versions of the press release (an official version and one in my own conversational voice), long and short game descriptions (roughly 800 and 300 Chinese characters), full-size and preview key art in square and landscape formats, 8–12 screenshots, our studio logo, a Steam QR code, a short walkthrough, and control instructions. We prepared versions in Japanese, Korean, English, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese.
Everything goes into a neatly organized cloud-drive folder. That lets me send one link and allows journalists and organizers to pick what they need. A press kit is rarely perfect on the first try; as you attend more exhibitions and meet more organizers' requirements, it gradually becomes more complete.
2. South Korea — Busan Indie Connect Festival 2026
Format: On-site exhibition with assistance from Taipei Game Show.
Cost: Flights and local meals; accommodation was covered by a subsidy. Total under NTD 30,000 (approximately JPY 145,000 or USD 900–1,000).
Wishlists: Around 150–200 including the lead-up and one-week tail; roughly 30 new wishlists per public day on-site.
Preparation: Online exhibition listing, business-matching system, free booth setup, 500 promotional cards, around 100 snack packs, and our own hardware. The organizers supplied the other half of the equipment at no charge.
Foot traffic: Relatively light; the aisles often looked half empty.
Six indie games traveled to BIC together under the guidance of the Taipei Game Show team. Compared with our previous baby-level arrangement, this felt more like a grandmother taking her grandchildren on a grand outing.
Most of the submission requirements—online forms, press kits, booth graphics, accommodation requests, Steam store information, and basic game details—had already been collected and organized into forms for us. We could fill them out and submit everything in one go. It saved an enormous amount of time.
I only fully appreciated this after attending other overseas events. What might otherwise have required one or two months of fiddly preparation was compressed into roughly a week. If something went wrong, we could report it to the Taipei Game Show team and feel confident it would be resolved. That also reduced the anxiety of waiting for replies and wondering whom to contact. Having someone lead the way is a blessing.
For hardware, BIC provided one computer and two monitors free of charge, saving us rental expenses. We only needed to bring a laptop to connect to the remaining display. Two minor details: South Korea uses round-pin outlets, so bring an appropriate adapter, and if you use an organizer-provided computer, be ready to navigate a Korean-language operating system.
BEXCO, the venue, is in Busan's Haeundae district, somewhat removed from the center and toward the end of a subway line. With several days of persistent rain, foot traffic seemed modest. Still, someone was playing at our booth around 80% of the time. Each computer served about as many players as at previous shows.
Yet every time I checked our wishlist numbers, I felt disappointed. At earlier exhibitions, gaining 70 or 80 wishlists a day was normal, and sometimes we'd get 100 or 200. At BIC, we were looking at just 20 or 30 a day.
Before anyone decides this was a terrible result, let me jump ahead: it really wasn't bad at all, especially for an event that cost me less than NTD 30,000. There are worse numbers coming later!
This feeling of never being satisfied is one reason I wanted to write this article. I hadn't seriously examined how my expectations about exhibition performance had become distorted.
At G-EIGHT 2025 in Taipei, we gained nearly 500 wishlists from a single exhibition. We had coverage from our big brother Bahamut, perhaps a little of that mystical Steam algorithm boost that comes with a newly launched store page (if such magic exists), the home-field advantage, and G-EIGHT's own reach. We were gaining around a hundred wishlists per event day. Even gamescom latam, where I didn't prepare the booth myself, and Taipei Game Show, where we had to compete with major publishers for attention, produced around 300–400 each. I'd begun to think that was what every exhibition ought to deliver.
At BIC, only about 100 of the new wishlists came from the physical show; the rest came from media coverage and the online exhibition. My first instinct was to blame my preparation. It was my first time personally exhibiting abroad, and to save money I went alone, one oversized nerd against the world. Our giveaways were basic cards. I hadn't hired an interpreter or cosplayer, or anyone to help hand out cards. No wonder, I thought, the results were merely average.
That planted an idea: at the next exhibition, I would spend substantially more and see whether greater investment really translated into better results.
(Please don't rush to call me an idiot. Consider this an experiment I paid for so the rest of you can learn from it.)
Before moving on, another tale of bad luck.
BIC was my first overseas exhibition in person. To save even more money, I'd planned to leave immediately after the last day and take a late-night flight home. Naturally, extreme weather had other plans.
It was around 10:30 p.m. before I confirmed at the gate that the flight had been canceled because of wind and rain. I didn't receive the cancellation certificate—necessary for travel inconvenience insurance—until 12:30 a.m. I called an Uber as quickly as I could, and even then waited an hour for a car. I was among the first passengers to get a ride; an entire planeload of people was still waiting outside the airport. I found a room at 3 a.m., dealt with my soaking clothes and equipment, and finally got to sleep at 4:30.
But even that wasn't the worst of it. Just wait for the next section.
There was a happier incident, too. I'd brought a mountain of snacks from Taiwan, with the energy of a grandmother convinced nobody had eaten enough. Altogether there were perhaps a thousand candies and biscuits. Because turnout was lower than expected, I handed out only about half.
Not wanting to haul the rest home, I activated my passive skill: Social Terrorist. On the final day, I went from booth to booth sharing sweets with developers from different countries, leaving a handful at each counter. Everyone smiled, and many gave me souvenirs in return: tiny button lights, mini fans, tote bags, drinks, more candy, and even energy bars ten times the size of my sweets.
In the end, I brought back more than I'd given away. My suitcase almost burst.
3. Germany — gamescom 2026
Format: Remote exhibition through a third-party representative.
Cost: Exhibition fees, representation fees, a pop-up display, and miscellaneous materials, totaling approximately NTD 160,000–180,000 (EUR 4,410–5,000; JPY 770,000–866,000; USD 4,900–5,500).
Wishlists: Around 500–600 including the week before and after; roughly 30–50 on-site QR scans per public day.
Preparation: Arranging the pop-up display, press-release distribution through our representative, and communication with the representative.
Foot traffic: Probably substantial, although I wasn't there to verify it personally.
First, please don't be frightened by the price. We had help from a friendly business partner to make this remote exhibition possible, so these figures shouldn't be treated as a standard market quotation. In fact, I suspect a normal arrangement could cost even more. I was already getting a bargain, and still had to wait for a place to open up.
I'm not completely foolish by nature. Back at BIC, I talked with experienced developers and exhibition representatives, and came away with a rather grim impression: overseas exhibitions are almost guaranteed to lose money in the short term. With a sponsor, you lose a little; paying everything yourself, you lose a lot.
And yet every international exhibition is full of teams from around the world. Many of the people I spoke to described similar arrangements: subsidies from agents, paid booth representatives like ours, support from their home countries, or assistance through competitions. Plenty of teams simply want to attend, whatever it takes, especially those without much recognition or industry backing. An exhibition is one of the few chances to make a real impression, one conversation at a time.
You can even find Japanese developers at a deeply local gathering like Bahamut's anniversary event. Why do we all keep going abroad if the financial returns look so bleak? I still don't fully understand it. I'm as puzzled as anyone—and I went anyway.
My own case is a little unusual. I could afford to spend some money, and this is the first game I've ever made. Even if the game eventually sells zero copies, I wanted to unlock at least one lifetime achievement and say I'd been there.
That doesn't mean I have an unlimited reservoir of cash. I usually budget around NTD 150,000 (about USD 4,600) for a major overseas exhibition, with a maximum of two such events. For smaller indie shows, I aim to stay under NTD 30,000. Remote representation takes priority whenever feasible.
Getting into Germany's gamescom was an opportunity I couldn't easily pass up. Finding the right contacts for European and American shows is difficult with my experience. Organizations such as Taiwan's trade promotion bodies and Taipei Game Show can't necessarily assist with those events, since they have budgets to consider too. Flying to Germany myself wasn't realistic. Our representative was someone we'd happened to meet at Taipei Game Show—without that encounter, this opportunity might never have existed.
Even the basic price was terrifying. An indie booth was quoted at EUR 3,630 (around NTD 130,000 or USD 4,000), about 2.6 times the NTD 50,000 we paid for our Tokyo booth. And even at that price we were on a waiting list. We never got into the indie area; instead, we were allocated a booth elsewhere, raising the fee to EUR 4,510 (NTD 166,245, or around USD 5,000). If we'd also ordered the organizer's standard booth construction, costs could have approached NTD 200,000 (USD 6,000).
So we did the only thing we could: put up our own portable display in a sea of dark booths.
(That may have been the one decision we got absolutely right.)
Now for the wishlists.
Showing an indie game at a major exhibition is risky and expensive. Most visitors head straight for the huge publishers' booths. The indie section can feel like the dark side of an empire, a place players stumble into only after getting lost. Even so, predictions about wishlist gains are almost an urban legend. Leaving aside already-famous games—because if we were famous, why would we need these shows?—the examples I found before attending suggested around 500–1,000 wishlists for gamescom. I suspected those were mostly success stories; people are naturally more likely to share good results.
I'd also attended Taipei Game Show, where we'd gained about 300–400 wishlists, so that provided another benchmark.
At gamescom, we ended up with approximately 500–600 wishlists and over 40,000 impressions. That seemed a little above the midpoint of the examples I'd collected. But the daily trend was downright bizarre.
Before the business days even began, we'd gained more than 100 wishlists. The business days brought over 200 more. Then the public days started, and the numbers fell sharply—from seventy-something at first to just 30 on the last day of our tracking period.
We seemed to be doing reasonably well in the platform's event rankings, hovering around positions 50–100 even as the daily numbers declined. But our booth wasn't in the indie section; our neighbors were selling merchandise and souvenirs, which may have made on-site conversion harder. According to our representative, the playable station was occupied almost the entire time.
By the last day, our backend data suggested that Steam was no longer sending meaningful traffic from the event. The 30 wishlists on that public day appeared to come from people scanning the QR code at the booth. If I set aside gamescom's astronomical cost, then for a modest setup, little publicity, and an almost bare-bones exhibition, those numbers weren't bad.
What really disappointed me was the business side. I supplied business cards and our representative worked hard to distribute them, but I wasn't there in person to explain the game or follow up with contacts. Afterward, virtually no publishers, business partners, or even service providers contacted us.
If half the reason to attend an exhibition is to make business connections—and it probably should be, because wishlists alone won't justify the cost—then perhaps the expense of attending in person isn't so easy to avoid.
4. Japan — TOKYO GAME SHOW 2026
Format: Mostly self-organized, with assistance and subsidies from Taiwan's trade promotion organization.
Cost: Exhibition fees, print advertising, translation, local staff, flights, accommodation, and miscellaneous materials, totaling around NTD 150,000 (EUR 4,100; JPY 722,000; USD 4,600).
Wishlists: Approximately 200 including the week before and after; potentially 400–500 when related Japanese media coverage is included. Around 30 on-site QR scans per public day.
Preparation: Communication with the organizers and trade promotion organization; coordination with translators and cosplayers; outreach to roughly 100 media contacts, primarily in Japanese and English, overlapping with our gamescom publicity; extensive backend forms and documentation; applications for official social-media exposure, guidebook advertising, and organizer-assisted PR; and advance conversations with around 20–30 publishers, service providers, and media contacts through the business-matching system.
Foot traffic: Definitely busy—but most people just passed us by.
After everything that came before, it was time for the final test.
If I'd held back on preparation or spending at earlier exhibitions, Tokyo was where I intended to make up for it. For the half of me that is still simply a gamer, Tokyo Game Show is sacred ground.
Looking back at how excited I was then, and comparing it with how I feel now, I'm almost at a loss for words. Tokyo could easily be its own article. But since I've already come this far, I'll finish the story here. Every episode could become a long tale; I'll try to keep them short.
People say Japanese companies are meticulous and demanding. Tokyo Game Show's administration certainly lived up to that reputation. Of all the event portals and registration processes I've ever used, this was the most complicated—without competition.
Remember how I said that Taipei Game Show's help compressed a month or two of BIC preparations into about a week? Tokyo did the reverse. Work that might take a month for a domestic show stretched into more than two months, partly because so many separate departments and contacts were responsible for different things.
Take media outreach, for example.
For TGS, I wanted to make a serious push internationally. When our Steam store page first went live, we'd mainly announced it to Taiwanese audiences. This was a chance to make up for that. I personally sent at least 50 pitches—35 to Japanese outlets and 15 to English-language outlets.
I wasn't expecting much. From what I'd read online, a game without established buzz, awards, or other credentials, supported only by a conventional press release, screenshots, and gameplay trailer clips, might get a response rate below 15%, and only a fraction of those responses would lead to published coverage.
Perhaps having “We're exhibiting at Tokyo Game Show” in the subject line helped. Seven or eight outlets agreed to publish something, and the traffic from those articles was comparable to what we received during the exhibition itself. TGS also offered an organizer-run PR service: you could send materials to the relevant contact, and the organizers would distribute the news in the name of Tokyo Game Show.
Of course, their team sometimes shortened my heartfelt, carefully written prose into a 300–500-character announcement along the lines of “This game is coming to TGS.” When I later found an absurdly short article, I knew the organizers had been at work. (Laughs.) That route resulted in about four more media placements, including some Taiwanese outlets. I hadn't expected the organizers to help send our news back home from Japan!
Media outreach wasn't the only opportunity. The organizers offered a 30th-anniversary social-media countdown, invitation tickets for creators, press, and VIPs, and advertisements in the event guidebook at prices at least somewhat approachable for indie teams. Each option had its own contact person. So the maze of separate windows wasn't entirely a bad thing: there were genuinely useful promotion channels available. If you didn't want them, you could ignore them and show up with the bare minimum.
Some requirements, however, were truly exhausting. TGS seemed to demand roughly twice as much administrative reporting as Taipei Game Show. You had to declare everything, down to the cards on your table, whether giveaways contained adult material, and whether food was fried, sticky, or sugary. When my first snack declaration was too vague, I sent a list of ten specific candies and biscuits for the organizers to choose from. They actually replied item by item: this one was fine, that one wasn't, with reasons for each. Then came further rounds of approvals for packaging and stickers. Good grief.
And now for the story everyone loves: how I paid to become a sucker in the advertising market.
The prices were jaw-dropping. Giant screens, dining-area ads, pillars around the cosplay zone, various sponsorship tiers—many cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of New Taiwan dollars. But I wanted to test the legend that more advertising would produce better conversions. Within my budget, I decided to buy myself a lesson and share the results with everyone.
Out of sheer curiosity, I bought a full-color page in the event guidebook for JPY 165,000. It was roughly A5-sized, a 4C1P advertisement. I was told there would be 7,000 English copies and 10,000 Japanese copies. Taiwan's trade promotion organization also printed promotional material for us free of charge, so the same artwork appeared in at least two places.
The results? Moving, in the worst possible sense. We were getting around 30 on-site wishlists a day. At that point, I couldn't even be bothered trying to separate scans of the booth QR code from scans of the guidebook. Have a laugh at my expense.
As for the business-matching system, I handled it myself and contacted as many relevant companies as I reasonably could. Since we already had ongoing conversations with some publishers, I focused mainly on journalists—especially outlets that had previously covered us and were attending TGS. I invited them to stop by the booth.
The response wasn't bad. More than half of those who agreed to visit actually came. But because I'd already pitched them before the show, many editors came to say hello, try the game, or introduce advertising packages. Relatively few went on to publish another article afterward.
Service providers were another story. Many arrived as scheduled, and many more showed up uninvited: animation studios, sound designers, music platforms, PR agencies, and organizers of other exhibitions. Yes, they were selling services, but many offered things we genuinely needed. Looking back, at least half of those contacts could become useful relationships.
They introduced us to application channels for overseas shows, more affordable remote exhibition options, reasonably priced PR and influencer services, partnership opportunities with other platforms, and marketing dashboards connected to Steam. These are all practical resources. In fact, the greatest benefit I got from TGS may have been access to overseas service networks that would have been very difficult to find through domestic exhibitions alone.
As for attracting players, I approached TGS like a pilgrimage. I wanted to weep at the holy wall of gaming. But five consecutive exhibition days were too much for my one-man army, so this time I decided to hire a cosplayer to help draw attention, just as we might do at home.
Before getting into that, I should stress that “self-organized” doesn't mean we received no help. Taiwan's trade promotion organization supported us enormously. Our original NTD 60,000 booth fee was reduced by NTD 10,000. Booth construction was covered. They helped communicate with the organizers and contractors—saving me another round of approvals like the snack ordeal—and even helped arrange local part-time staff. It was rather like studying abroad independently while your parents still quietly took care of a thousand practical details.
Why hire locally instead of bringing another teammate? Each person traveling from Taiwan would need flights, food, and accommodation. Flights alone would add at least NTD 15,000 (around JPY 70,000) per person. Hiring someone locally for around JPY 20,000 a day seemed more reasonable, considering that I understood the usual cosplayer rate to be about JPY 25,000–30,000 per day plus around JPY 10,000 for costume preparation.
There was an unexpected bonus. Although on-site results were underwhelming, posts featuring our cosplayer on X achieved sharing and conversion comparable to a press release. Most importantly, this wasn't exposure borrowed from someone else's huge following. It happened on our own account, which had fewer than 100 followers.
Finally, the typhoon.
Tokyo Game Show was celebrating its 30th anniversary and coincided with a Japanese holiday, so it had added an extra day. I initially thought we were lucky. Then the typhoon arrived and effectively swallowed the cost of our final exhibition day.
Worse, I couldn't simply fly home early. I was stuck in my hotel, unable to do much of anything.
The silver lining was that I was once again a one-man army. I didn't have to evacuate an entire team. But the disruption spread well beyond the exhibition.
Hotels around Tokyo, Chiba, and Makuhari were fully booked. Thanks to years of traveling independently, I'd chosen Nishi-Funabashi as my transport hub and planned to use the Keisei railway to get to the airport. Many other teams had apparently chosen Tokyo as their hub, hoping to take the Skyliner directly to Narita. After the storm, that service was disrupted, leaving some people to try buses—only to get caught in road traffic.
I somehow reached the airport despite a railway delay of at least an hour. I call it dumb luck because the service stopped entirely just a couple of trains after mine.
I thought that was the end of my typhoon adventures. Then came Bahamut's 30th Anniversary Gathering, and another typhoon took away a day of the event.
Well. I suppose I'm used to it by now.
Conclusion
All right. This article is nearly ten thousand Chinese characters long. Maybe I simply had too much to get off my chest, or maybe it's because I'd promised so many people that I would finally write down these experiences. Either way, finishing it feels like paying off a debt. What a relief.
I know I promised to be selective, yet I still haven't organized every number and lesson as neatly as I'd like. There was just so much worth sharing. Every experience mattered to me, and every time I considered cutting something, I felt a little reluctant. Believe it or not, even at this length I've left out plenty of stories.
One of those stories leads to the question I want to end with: “If you could do it all over again, what would you regret, or what would you do better?”
A senior figure in the industry asked me that after I returned home. Despite how much money I'd apparently spent learning these lessons the hard way, someone still wanted to interview me about them. (I'll keep their identity a secret for now; you'll hear about it when the interview comes out.)
At the time, I forced myself to come up with a few things I could have improved. But now, another week later, my answer is:
Almost nothing.
Because I gave it everything I had. In the end, the fundamental decision was whether to attend at all.
One option was not to go. I'd have avoided the expenses, losses, and distractions from development. I'd have had more energy and time to work on the game. But I'd also have missed the rare experiences, friendships, business connections, personal achievements, and yes, even those pitifully few wishlists.
The other option was to acknowledge my own effort. I did the research I could, prepared as thoroughly as I knew how, and worked as hard as I could. It's difficult to blame the version of me who went into these events without the benefit of hindsight. Perhaps I could have stood for another thirty minutes instead of resting, spent more time screening staff, or somehow learned to predict typhoons.
Either choice would have brought its own rewards and regrets. All I can do now is lay out everything that happened, so the people who come after me have something to learn from.
“If you follow in my footsteps, here's what you might experience—and here's your chance to do it better than I did.”