Make-A-Wish gaming – Ways Indies Can Get Involved With Make-A-Wish in 2026:

Most indie developers think about Make-A-Wish the way everyone thinks about it: a large charity that grants wishes for critically ill children, mostly connected to Disney, sports, or celebrity encounters. What fewer people know is that gaming has become one of the most active and growing areas of Make-A-Wish‘s work, and that indie studios of any size have real, concrete ways to be part of it.

Ian Wright, lead manager for gaming fundraising at Make-A-Wish America, and April Stallings, who runs gaming fundraising for Make-A-Wish International, joined Ash Cason on the IndieGameBusiness® podcast to talk through exactly how that works. What came out of the conversation was a surprisingly practical and personal picture of what involvement looks like, why gaming has become central to the mission, and why small studios are not just welcome but genuinely needed.

Who Ian and April Are and What They Actually Do:

Ian describes his role simply: he is the gaming guy for Make-A-Wish America. If it involves Make-A-Wish and video games in the United States, he is involved. His work covers content creators, game companies, brands, community fundraising campaigns, and occasionally the part of the job he loves most, actually granting gaming-related wishes.

April came to Make-A-Wish through a similar path. A lifelong gamer whose father owned a coin arcade, she spent over two decades in the nonprofit sector before landing the opportunity to build a content creator-led fundraising program for Make-A-Wish Canada at the start of the pandemic. She has since moved to Make-A-Wish International, covering everything outside the United States, which means nearly fifty countries.

The two organizations operate independently for practical reasons: different time zones, languages, currencies, legal structures, and cultures. But Ian and April work closely together, particularly on gaming, because they both understand that gaming is a global audience and treating it as a regional one misses the point.

The Wish That Started Everything:

Ian closed the conversation with the origin story of Make-A-Wish, and it is worth knowing. On April 29, 1980, a young boy named Chris Gricus in Phoenix, Arizona was diagnosed with leukemia. Chris had always wanted to be a police officer. His parents connected with the local police department, who gave him a uniform, a badge, and made him a Phoenix police officer for the day. He rode in a patrol car, wore his uniform, and when someone mentioned he loved helicopters, the officers did not just let him look at one. They flew him over the city of Phoenix.

A few days later, Chris told his mother he did not feel well. The next day, he was gone. His mother Linda looked at what had happened for her son and decided it could not just be for Chris. That conviction became the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Linda is still involved with the organization today.

Ian had the chance to sit with Linda one-on-one during his first year at Make-A-Wish. When he explained his work in gaming and how he raises money through content creators and industry partnerships, Linda reached across the table and said: thank you for telling Chris’s story to a new audience. That is the framing Ian carries into every conversation about gaming and Make-A-Wish.

What Make-A-Wish gaming wishes Actually Look Like:

The range of gaming wishes is wider than most people expect. Ian and April described requests that covered practically every genre and platform, including:

• Fortnite and Minecraft wishes, which remain consistently popular
• Roblox experiences and custom in-game moments
• Attending major esports events and gaming conventions like TwitchCon and VidCon
• Meeting favorite content creators and getting to play games with them
• Creating their own video game, which Make-A-Wish has facilitated with indie studios
• Visiting specific game studios, sometimes for games that came out years ago

That last point stood out in the conversation. April described a recent wish request from a child who wanted to visit a major Nordic studio. She assumed the wish was about the studio’s current high-profile title. It was not. The child wanted to talk about a game the studio made seven years ago. The studio was as surprised as April was, and equally moved.

The wishes are only limited by what a child can imagine. That unpredictability is exactly why Make-A-Wish wants to build a deeper network of contacts across the games industry, so that when an unusual wish comes in, they have someone to call.

How Make-A-Wish and Gaming Work Together:

Make-A-Wish runs gaming-related activity across several formats, and the entry points for indie studios vary depending on what a studio can offer. The main ways gaming companies and individuals currently get involved include:

• Fundraising campaigns. Developers can run time-limited fundraising events, charity streams, or in-game activations where proceeds benefit Make-A-Wish. These can be scaled to the size of the studio and the audience it has.
• Wish granting. Studios can participate directly in granting a gaming-related wish. This might mean hosting a child at the studio, creating a custom in-game item or experience, or helping a child design their own game. Ian and April have worked with indie developers to make this happen.
• Creator partnerships. Make-A-Wish works with content creators at every level to fundraise and spread awareness. Indie studios that have relationships with creators can help facilitate those connections.
• World Wish Month activations. April is World Wish Month, with April 29 designated as World Wish Day in honor of Chris’s wish in 1980. This is one of the highest-activity fundraising periods of the year and an obvious moment for studios to participate.
• Summer of Wishes. Make-A-Wish America runs a summer campaign covering June, July, and August. This is another structured period where studios can plug into existing campaigns rather than building something from scratch.

Why Indie Developers Are a Particularly Good Fit:

Ian and April were direct about this: indie studios are not a lower-priority partner because they are smaller. In some respects they are more valuable, because indie developers can move quickly, take creative risks, and have direct relationships with their communities in ways that large publishers do not.

April described the wish-granting network they are trying to build as a database of people and studios who have told Make-A-Wish what they can offer. When a wish comes in that requires something specific, they can go directly to the right person. An indie developer who makes a niche genre might be exactly the right fit for a child whose wish centers on that genre. Without that developer in the network, the wish either does not happen or takes significantly longer to arrange.

Ian added that he actively enjoys hearing unusual ideas and pitching them internally. If an indie developer comes to him with a creative proposal for a fundraising event or wish experience that he has not seen before, his instinct is to find a way to make it work, not to filter it out for being unconventional.

The Scale of What Make-A-Wish Does and Why It Needs Support:

Since 1980, Make-A-Wish has granted more than 650,000 wishes. The organization currently grants a wish approximately every thirty minutes somewhere in the world. At the same time, a child is diagnosed with a wish-eligible illness roughly every twenty minutes.

That gap, between the rate of wishes being granted and the rate of new children becoming eligible, is why fundraising and community involvement matter so much. Make-A-Wish reports that around sixty percent of wish children go on to live long lives. The wish itself is not a final gesture. It is something that carries forward. Ian and April both use the same phrase: not a last wish, but a lasting wish.

Make-A-Wish gaming | How to Get Involved as an Indie Developer:

Make-A-Wish has created a form specifically for indie developers and small publishers to tell the organization what they can offer. This is the most direct first step for any studio that wants to be part of wish granting or fundraising. The information goes into a working database that Ian and April can pull from when wishes come in.

Beyond the form, there are several practical ways to get involved:

• Fill out the Make-A-Wish developer interest form to get into their network
• Reach out directly to Ian Wright for Make-A-Wish America partnerships
• Reach out directly to April Stallings for Make-A-Wish International partnerships
• Connect through the IndieGameBusiness®  Discord, where both Ian and April are active members
• Contact Ash Cason [Discord: Pebbster] through IndieGameBusiness®  if you cannot reach Ian or April directly
• Plan around World Wish Month in April or the Summer of Wishes campaign for structured activation opportunities

Ian’s message to developers considering it was clear: reach out regardless of studio size. There is no minimum threshold for involvement. If you have an idea, even an unusual one, bring it. The worst outcome is a conversation. The best outcome is a child getting a wish that would not have been possible without your specific expertise or community.

A Community Built Around Something That Matters:

What came through clearly in the conversation was that this partnership between gaming and Make-A-Wish is not a corporate sponsorship arrangement or a checkbox exercise. Ian spent years in military nonprofits before Make-A-Wish. April spent over two decades in fundraising before finding a way to bring gaming into the work she cared about. Both of them got into this because they are gamers who believe the games community is capable of doing something genuinely meaningful with its size and creativity.

The games industry tends to be good at building community around shared passion. Make-A-Wish is asking that same instinct to show up for children who are navigating something no child should have to navigate. For indie developers who want their work to mean something beyond the screen, this is a direct and practical way to make that happen.

To get involved, fill out the Make-A-Wish developer interest form, connect with Ian and April in the Indie Game Business Discord, or reach out to Ash Cason at IndieGameBusiness®.

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Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Deep Dive, taking place on May 27th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Ian, April, and other industry pros.

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Indie Game Marketing Strategy – What Actually Drives Game Sales:

Viral moments feel like the goal. A clip blows up on TikTok, a streamer picks up your game, and suddenly everyone knows it exists. But awareness alone does not pay for the next project. Sales do, and sales require more than hype.

Eleni Sagredos, a growth marketer who has worked with indie studios, publishers, and large-scale creator campaigns, joined Dan Long on the IndieGameBusiness® podcast to break down what actually moves players from discovery to purchase. What she described is a structured, measurable system that most indie developers either do not know about or are only partially using.

What Growth Marketing Actually Means:

The term growth marketing gets used loosely, so Eleni started with a clear definition. Growth marketing is not just paid advertising or social media management. It is an understanding of the full customer journey, specifically where a player is in that journey at any given moment and which actions will move them to the next stage.

The practical implication is that marketing channels are not interchangeable. TikTok, email, press, paid ads, and influencer partnerships all serve different functions depending on where a player is in the buying process. When developers say a particular channel does not work, Eleni’s first question is always: does not work for what goal? The channel may be perfectly functional, just applied at the wrong stage of the funnel.

The Marketing Funnel and How It Applies to Games:

Eleni walked through the three stages of the marketing funnel and how each one maps to the game buying journey:

• Top of funnel: Awareness. This is where players first discover that your game exists. Content that stops the scroll, a viral clip, a striking visual, a gameplay moment that spreads organically. The goal is reach and discovery, not conversion. Channels that work here include TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and organic social posts.

• Middle of funnel: Consideration. The player has seen the game but has not committed. Now the goal is to build trust. When someone sees a viral clip and gets curious, they typically Google the game next. What they find at that moment determines whether they move forward. Reviews, press coverage, social proof, and consistent community presence all contribute here.

• Bottom of funnel: Conversion. This is where awareness turns into a wishlist add or a purchase. The Steam page is the primary conversion point for most indie games. A strong capsule image and a gameplay-first video carry enormous weight at this stage. Eleni stressed the distinction between a trailer and a gameplay video. She skips through trailers looking for actual gameplay, and so do most players.

Understanding which stage you are trying to influence at any given moment changes how you evaluate whether your marketing is working. A TikTok that gets a million views is not a failure if it does not immediately convert to sales. It is doing top-of-funnel work. The question is whether your mid and bottom-funnel systems are in place to catch the people it sends your way.

Why Indie Game Marketing Strategy Hype Alone Does Not Drive Sales:

A lot of developers look at a game that went viral and attribute its success entirely to the viral moment. Eleni’s point is that this misreads the situation. The viral moment is visible. What is not visible is everything else that happened simultaneously or shortly after: the press coverage, the review scores, the gameplay footage, the community response on social media. All of those elements work together to convert awareness into purchases.

Focusing only on creating a viral moment while neglecting the rest of the funnel means that when attention does arrive, there is nothing in place to convert it. Players who discover your game and then find no reviews, no active social presence, no gameplay footage, and a weak Steam page will move on. The hype dissipates and the sales never materialize.

The Steam Page as Your Most Important Conversion Tool:

Eleni emphasized the Steam page as the place where purchasing decisions actually get made. Everything above it in the funnel is driving traffic to that page. What players find when they arrive determines what happens next.

The two elements that carry the most weight on a Steam page:

• The capsule image. This is the first impression. It needs to communicate genre, tone, and visual identity instantly. A weak capsule image costs you players before they ever read a single word about the game.

• The video. Eleni was direct: put gameplay at the start. Not a cinematic. Not a tone piece. Actual gameplay. Players are evaluating whether this is something they want to spend time with, and the fastest way to show them that is to show them playing it. Trailers that bury gameplay or avoid showing it altogether create doubt rather than excitement.

The rest of the Steam page, the description, the tags, the screenshots, all matter. But the capsule and the video are the gatekeepers. If those do not land, most players will not read far enough to be influenced by anything else.

Social Proof and Why It Has to Come Before Launch:

One of Eleni’s strongest recommendations was to start building social proof at least six months before launch. The reasoning is straightforward: when a player hears about your game at launch and gets curious, they investigate. What they find during that investigation either builds confidence or raises doubts.

Social proof in this context means more than social media follower counts. It includes:

• Press coverage and articles about the game
• Review scores and written reviews from any source
• Community discussion on Reddit, Discord, and social platforms
• Creator content showing real gameplay
• Wishlists as a signal that other people have already decided this looks worth trying

If none of that exists when a player goes looking, the game feels like a risk. Players who are on the fence will not take that risk. They will move on to something with more visible validation.

Starting early is not about spending money on paid promotion six months out. It is about building the foundation of trust that launch-day marketing will rely on. Press outreach, community building, creator relationships, and organic content all take time to develop. Starting at launch is too late.

Email and Social as the Foundation of a Marketing System:

When asked where to invest limited marketing resources, Eleni did not point to paid ads or a single platform. She pointed to email and social, specifically because they are channels the developer controls.

Her reasoning on email:

• Email consistently delivers one of the highest ROI of any marketing channel
• A newsletter audience is a warm audience that has already opted in
• Unlike social algorithms, email reaches the people who signed up directly
• Email covers more than newsletters. Creator outreach and press outreach both run through email, making it a multi-purpose channel

Her guidance on when to send emails was practical: only reach out when you have something specific to say. A message that opens with a clear call to action, a playtest invitation, a launch announcement, an exclusive key offer for creators, will perform. A message that opens with a general check-in will get ignored and eventually filtered out.

On social, she recommended posting with intention rather than volume. Each post should have a clear sense of where in the funnel it belongs and what it is trying to accomplish. Posting regularly without that clarity produces content that exists but does not move anyone closer to a purchase.

Working With Creators and Influencers:

Creators are part of the picture, but not a substitute for the full system. Eleni has worked with major creators including Markiplier, and she confirmed that large creators do move the needle when the fit is right. She has also run press outreach campaigns to more than a hundred smaller creators simultaneously, which takes more time to manage but produces a different kind of result.

The distinction she drew between large and small creators is worth understanding:

• Large creators often have parasocial audiences who will act on recommendations with genuine conviction. A well-placed video from the right large creator can produce a significant and fast sales spike. The risk is cost and fit. A poorly matched large creator campaign can produce almost nothing despite significant spend.
• Small creators tend to have more engaged, interactive communities. A creator with a hundred viewers who genuinely talks with their audience can produce higher conversion rates per viewer than a creator with a thousand viewers who broadcasts rather than interacts. The tradeoff is scale and management time.

Her overall recommendation was to work with a mix, calibrated to the size and capacity of your team. If you are a solo developer managing marketing alongside production, working with a handful of creators across different size tiers is more sustainable than coordinating a hundred-person outreach campaign.

What to Do on LinkedIn as a Game Developer:

Eleni mentioned LinkedIn as an underused channel for game developers, particularly for building industry credibility and reaching press and creator contacts directly. Her observation on what performs there:

• Posts that establish authority by connecting with other industry professionals and documenting real events and relationships
• Free, practical marketing information shared openly without a sales pitch
• Content framed around informing rather than entertaining, which fits how LinkedIn audiences use the platform

LinkedIn is not where you will find players, but it is where you will find press contacts, potential collaborators, publisher representatives, and the kind of industry relationships that support the rest of your marketing work.

Final Advice for Indie Developers on Indie Game Marketing Strategy:

Eleni’s single most important piece of advice for indie developers marketing their games:

Start early. Build social proof before launch. When players hear about your game for the first time, they will look for evidence that other people have already decided it is worth their attention. Your job in the months before launch is to make sure that evidence exists.

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Deep Dive, taking place on May 27th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Eleni and other industry pros.

The IndieGameBusiness® podcast drops new episodes regularly, covering the business side of making and selling games. Subscribe to the newsletter to get episodes, Discord events, and industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe now

Why Small Indie Game Studio are the future :

The games industry spent roughly two decades chasing scale. Bigger teams, bigger budgets, bigger worlds. The result was a generation of massive productions that left very little room for creative risk, with thousands of people working on individual components of something so large that no single person could hold the whole vision in their head at once.

Alexandre Amancio has lived that reality firsthand. As a former creative director at Ubisoft, he worked on titles including Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry 2, and was part of teams that reached a thousand people. Now he runs Studio Ellipsis in Lisbon, Portugal, and he joined
Dan Long on the IndieGameBusiness podcast to talk about why he believes the future of games belongs to smaller teams, what that actually looks like in practice, and what developers building studios today need to get right from the start.

From Physics to Ubisoft:

Alexandre’s path into games was anything but direct. He started studying physics and assumed that his creative side would remain a hobby. That changed when Jurassic Park came out and he saw what CGI was capable of. The idea that a filmmaker could reconstruct extinct animals through synthetic environments that looked genuinely real was enough to convince him to leave his physics program and enroll in a 3D modeling course.

Getting into games from there was not straightforward either. Montreal had no games industry at the time, so he started his career building flight simulators for commercial and military clients. When Ubisoft eventually opened a studio in Montreal, he applied and was rejected. He landed instead at a small indie studio, and he credits that experience as the foundation of everything that came after.

At that small studio, he had to do everything. There was no division of labor narrow enough to confine him to one task. He did art, design, writing, and whatever else needed doing. That breadth of exposure opened up the possibility of creative direction in a way that a specialized role at a large studio never would have. Eventually he did make it to Ubisoft, where he art directed Far Cry 2 and went on to creative direction work on Assassin’s Creed Revelations before Assassin’s Creed Unity.

The contrast between those two environments shaped how he thinks about team size and creative output in ways that still inform how he runs Studio Ellipsis today.

Why the Industry Hit a Saturation Point:

To understand why Alexandre believes smaller teams represent the future, it helps to understand how he reads the last twenty years of the industry’s history. The games business grew from a niche into a dominant entertainment industry. That growth was real and substantial, but it came with a side effect: the practices that developed during a boom period got treated as permanent best practices even after the conditions that created them changed.

The response to growth was to get bigger. Games became more expensive. The more expensive they became, the less risk anyone was willing to take, because the stakes attached to each release were too high to gamble on something unproven. Studios returned repeatedly to formulas that had worked before. The result was a plateau where technically impressive, enormously ambitious games existed in abundance, but genuinely original experiences became rare.

Players noticed. There are games so large you could spend years inside them. But after enough of those, players started looking for something different, something that felt surprising and personal rather than optimized and familiar. Alexandre’s observation is that those original experiences are currently coming from smaller studios with less to lose, teams that can afford to try something unusual because a failure does not cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.

What a Team of a Thousand People Actually Feels Like:

Alexandre described his experience directing a game with a thousand people working on it, and the description is worth sitting with. His job at that scale felt less like creative direction and more like a stage magician running between spinning plates, catching whichever one was about to fall and giving it enough momentum to keep going before sprinting to the next.

The problem with that kind of work is not that the people involved are not talented. It is that at sufficient scale, a coherent creative vision becomes genuinely difficult to maintain. Work gets segmented. People own a piece of something and execute it well in isolation, but the connective tissue between those pieces, the sense that everything is part of a single unified thing, becomes harder and harder to preserve. The person who only animates fingers is very good at animating fingers, but may never fully understand how those fingers connect to the emotional experience the game is trying to create.

Smaller teams do not have that problem in the same way. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. When something needs to get done and no one else is going to pick it up, the person who notices it tends to handle it. The game becomes a living thing built collectively rather than assembled from parts. That intimacy at the production level tends to create intimacy in the product itself.

Creative Constraint as a Design Tool:

One of the most practically useful ideas Alexandre shared is the concept of creative constraint, which he treats not as a limitation but as a deliberate design tool. He described it as defining the lens through which every decision in a game gets evaluated.

The specific form this takes can vary. It might be the player fantasy, the central experience the game is built around. It might be a single defining question: what is this game fundamentally about? Whatever form it takes, having that anchor matters because game development involves an enormous number of decisions made under conditions of constant change. Without a fixed reference point, even smart people with good instincts will get roughly half of those decisions wrong, simply because there are too many shifting variables to track without something to align toward.

With a clear creative constraint established, decisions become faster and more coherent. You hold each choice up to the lens and ask whether it fits. The decisions that do not fit get cut or reworked. The decisions that do fit reinforce the game’s identity. Over time, that coherence is what separates games that feel intentional from games that feel like a collection of features that never quite added up to something.

He was careful to say this does not require having every detail planned out in advance. The constraint is not a detailed design document. It is a high-level understanding of what the game is and what experience it is trying to create. Everything else can remain exploratory, as long as exploration keeps returning to that anchor.

How to Think About Game Festivals When You Are Just Starting Out:

A question came in during the live session from a small studio about to show their first game publicly. They asked whether it made more sense to start with smaller regional festivals to build credibility before approaching larger ones like IGF, or whether it was worth targeting the bigger events directly.

Alexandre’s answer was honest about the limits of general advice here: both approaches can work, and the right answer depends on the specific game, what the studio has to show, and what outcome they are trying to create. He has seen studios go the regional route and build momentum gradually. He has also seen studios go directly to a major festival and create real noise with their first appearance. Neither path is universally correct.

His actual recommendation was to trust your own instincts more than external frameworks. The developer who built the game knows the game better than anyone giving advice from the outside. The quiet internal voice that is already leaning toward one answer or the other is usually reading the situation more accurately than the louder voices of received wisdom about what the correct strategy should be.

What Alexandre Would Tell Developers Starting Out Today:

• Remember that you are making games for a living, and that means fun is not optional. When pressure builds, when money gets tight, when things are not going the way you expected, the developers who keep a connection to why they got into this work in the first place tend to navigate those periods better than those who lose it.
• Know your creative constraint before you go deep into production. You do not need to have every system mapped out. But you do need to know what your game is at a fundamental level, what experience it is creating and for whom. That clarity will protect you from a significant amount of rework and help your team make consistent decisions even when you are not in the room.
• Accept that exploring novelty means accepting iteration. If you are genuinely trying to create something that has not been done before, you will have to try things that do not work and redo things that seemed right but were not. That is not a failure of process. It is what the process of finding something new actually looks like. The goal is not to avoid that iteration but to use your creative constraint to make sure the iteration stays pointed in the right direction.

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Building MeetToMatch and Game Industry Networking – A Conversation With Fedor van Herpen:

Some of the most useful businesses in the games industry did not start with a grand vision. They started with someone trying to solve an immediate, practical problem. That is more or less the origin story of MeetToMatch, the matchmaking platform that has become a fixture of major games industry conferences around the world.

Fedor van Herpen, one of MeetToMatch‘s co-founders, joined Jay Powell on the IndieGameBusiness podcast for a candid conversation about how the platform came to be, what the acquisition by ONESP means for the company’s future, how conferences have shifted since COVID, and what developers need to understand about networking and pitching in the current market.

How MeetToMatch Started From an Intern and a Spreadsheet:

Fedor did not plan to be in the games industry. His original goal was a corporate internship at Shell, the oil company. When that fell through, he scrambled to find something else and landed at a Dutch conference called the Festival of Games in Utrecht. He went in with no expectations and found that he genuinely liked the work.

The problem he encountered there was a familiar one for anyone who has tried to coordinate meetings at a large event. The first year the conference attempted to facilitate networking between attendees, they did it in an Excel spreadsheet. It did not go well. Fedor and his eventual co-founder Ansgar, who was his manager at the time, built a matchmaking platform to replace the spreadsheet and solve the problem properly.

That solution became MeetToMatch. Years later, Ansgar and Fedor are still running it together, with Ansgar occasionally reminding Fedor that he used to be the intern. The platform has since become one of the standard tools used at major games conferences to connect developers, publishers, investors, and service providers.

The ONESP Acquisition and What It Actually Changed:

Earlier this year, MeetToMatch was acquired by ONESP, which stands for One Shared Passion. ONESP is a group of companies focused on games and consumer technology, with operations spanning PR and marketing, VR development, retail marketing, and influencer management. The acquisition took MeetToMatch from a team of ten to being part of a five hundred person organization.

Fedor was candid about what that transition has and has not changed. The day to day operation of MeetToMatch remains largely the same. ONESP has been hands off, telling Fedor and his team to keep running the business and focus on growth. What has genuinely shifted is the access to people and ideas. Directors from other companies within the group reach out regularly now with collaboration proposals or requests for help. And perhaps more importantly, Fedor and Ansgar are no longer two founders on an island when they need to think through a difficult decision. They now have a network of other company leaders within ONESP they can speak to in confidence.

That shift from isolated ownership to being part of a broader organization, while still retaining operational control, is a meaningful change for anyone who has run a small company. The business decisions are still theirs, but the support structure around those decisions is significantly deeper.

How Game Industry Conferences Changed After COVID:

Jay asked Fedor to reflect on how the conference and event market has evolved from pre-pandemic to now, and the answer was more nuanced than a simple return to normal.

On attendee behavior, Fedor said things look largely the same as pre-pandemic. People want to meet in person. Virtual conferences, which had a genuine moment during the COVID years, have largely lost their appeal now that in-person events are accessible again. The appetite for online-only professional events has dropped significantly.

What has changed is the type of event people prefer. Fedor observed that attendees are gravitating toward smaller, more intimate conferences over the massive shows. The big events still have value, particularly for building broad visibility and meeting a wide range of contacts in a short period. But the preference for focused, relationship-driven gatherings has grown noticeably.

He also noted that the business model around conferences has shifted. Sponsors are more cautious and more selective. They are not writing checks for conferences just to have their name attached. They want to see clear evidence of return on investment. This has created real pressure on conference organizers, who have to demonstrate value to sponsors in concrete terms rather than relying on the general goodwill and promotional instincts that used to drive sponsorship decisions.

The Real Value of In-Person Networking for Indie Developers:

One of the most instructive parts of the conversation was the dynamic between Jay and Fedor themselves. Jay told Fedor on the podcast that MeetToMatch had effectively ended one of his early business lines. He and his team used to be hired by government agencies and other organizations to coordinate their meetings at GDC and Gamescom. When MeetToMatch became widely used, the need for that service evaporated.

Rather than any tension in that story, it illustrated something important about how the games industry actually operates at the conference level. Jay’s reaction at the time was not frustration but pragmatism: why would anyone pay for something that a better tool now does automatically? That kind of honest market assessment is what professional networking in this industry tends to look like.

The conversation also touched on what makes games industry networking distinct. Fedor and Jay described a culture where developers, publishers, and service providers are genuinely rooting for the broader industry to succeed. A developer without a publishing deal is more likely to be pointed toward a publisher that is a good fit than to be left without help. There is competitive tension at the business level, but at the conference floor level, the prevailing attitude is collaborative.

That culture is part of what makes the games conference circuit worth investing in for indie developers. It is not a scene where you are competing against everyone in the room. It is one where most people in the room have some interest in seeing good games find their audience.

When Should Developers Start Submitting Games to Festivals and Events?:

A question came in during the live session from the IndieGameBusiness Discord asking about the right moment to submit a game to festivals and what level of polish those events actually expect. Both Fedor and Jay addressed it directly.

Fedor’s position was that developers need at minimum a playable demo or vertical slice, something that lets people experience the core game loop with actual design in place. Not placeholder art, not a prototype held together with concept sketches, but something that communicates what the game actually is and feels like to play.

Jay added an important distinction between two different audiences: publishers and investors on one hand, and the public on the other. A build that crashes or has visible bugs can be acceptable when you are showing it to a publisher or investor who understands the development process and can look past surface issues to evaluate the core concept. The same build shown to players at a public event is a different situation entirely. Your audience at a public showcase does not have the context to look past instability. They need something that is fun and stable enough to represent the game honestly.

His overall recommendation was to submit often, across the many events and festivals available throughout the year on and off Steam. The opportunity to get your game in front of people is too valuable to wait for perfection. But whatever you submit publicly needs to have a genuinely fun core loop and be stable enough that it does not damage the impression a player forms in those first few minutes with the game.

What Happens When Developers Acquire Existing IP:

The second Discord question touched on acquiring intellectual property from an original creator, which is a situation that comes up more often than many developers expect, particularly with retro or dormant game properties.

Fedor’s core point was that when you take on existing IP, the audience attached to that IP comes with it and brings expectations. The new game needs to respect what players loved about the original property. If your reimagined version strips out the elements that defined the original and only keeps the name and visual brand, you have the IP but you do not have the goodwill that was supposed to come with it.

Jay reinforced this from the publishing perspective. There are many examples of classic games being relaunched or reimagined that bear little resemblance to what made the original work. Players who show up for a beloved IP and find that the new version has discarded everything they cared about do not become fans of the new game. They become critics of it. If you are going to acquire and build on existing IP, faithfulness to the core experience of the original is not optional.

The Broader Case for Conferences as a Business Tool:

One thread running through the entire conversation was that conferences, done right, are not just networking opportunities. They are a place where real business relationships form over time, where candid conversations happen that would not happen over email, and where the informal moments often produce more value than the scheduled meetings.

Fedor and Jay’s own friendship is a product of years of showing up at the same events. They have competed for the same contracts without animosity, supported each other through difficult periods in their businesses, and built the kind of trust that only comes from repeated in-person contact over a long time.

For indie developers trying to find publishers, investors, co-developers, or simply mentors who have navigated similar challenges, that model of sustained conference presence is worth taking seriously. A single GDC or Gamescom trip is rarely transformative. But a developer who shows up consistently, has something worth showing, and treats every conversation as a long-term relationship investment will build a network that pays off in ways that are hard to manufacture any other way.

Where to Find MeetToMatch:

MeetToMatch is available through the conferences and events that use the platform for attendee matchmaking. Developers looking to get the most out of their conference presence can use MeetToMatch to pre-schedule meetings and identify the right contacts before they arrive, rather than spending the first day of an event figuring out who they need to talk to.

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Deep Dive, taking place on May 27th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Fedor and other industry pros.

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