LudoNarraCon — Fellow Traveller Press Kit

Description

LudoNarraCon is an annual digital festival celebrating narrative video games and the developers who make them.

An initiative of indie label Fellow Traveller, the festival takes place primarily on Steam and provides a platform to showcase and celebrate interesting and innovative narrative games through demos, panels, fireside chats, discounts and more.

The first edition ran in April 2019 and the eighth edition will take place from October 8-12, 2026.

Each edition includes several major elements, all of which come together on the event page within Steam

The Official Selection

This is the heart of the festival. Each year Fellow Traveller selects around 50 games from the 500+ submitted titles and presents them as the LudoNarraCon Official Selection. Official Selection titles are a mix of recent releases and upcoming games and represent some of the best and most interesting narrative games. Whilst all the games share a common thread of story being at the heart of the experience, within the selection there is a diversity of genre, mechanic, theme, studio location, studio size and development team composition. A key goal is to support new voices and developers from under-represented groups as well as more established developers.

Unreleased games included in the Official Selection must provide a playable demo whilst released titles must run a discount during the festival (with some exceptions for titles that have released just before the event and are in discount cooldown).

The Theatre

Each edition of the LudoNarraCon festival features a program of around 16 hours of streaming content including panels, fireside chats and demo playthrough streams. Panels are usually submitted by the game development community and curated by the organisers, who also invite leading narrative game developers for in-depth Fireside Chats, usually hosted by a fellow developer or journalist. Meanwhile demo streams by partnering media outlets showcase some of the games from the Official Selection.

From 2019 to 2023 the theatre programming was broadcast live and then looped but since 2024 the programming has been pre-recorded shortly before the festival. This has allowed Fellow Traveller to debut the theatre content on Steam and YouTube simultaneously and to make each panel/chat/demo stream available for on demand viewing on YouTube as soon as its premiere broadcast has completed.

Almost all theatre content from the festival to date can be viewed on Fellow Traveller’s YouTube channel.

Event Sale

LudoNarraCon is also a curated narrative games sale with over 150 story—rich indie games discounted during the festival.

During the 2025 edition a time-limited Story-Rich Megabundle was offered only for the duration of the festival. It featured 10 games and offered a discount of 85% on their combined SRP when you bought the complete bundle. The games included in the bundle were Not For Broacast, Genesis Noir, Beacon Pines, Citizen Sleeper, A Space for the Unbound, Monster Prom 3, Needy Streamer Overload, Sable, Norco and The Pale Beyond.

Media

To facilitate media coverage of the event and games in the Official Selection, media and content creators can apply for the Fellow Traveller Backstage Pass which gives them access to a press portal featuring early access to press kits, media-ready demos, and contact details for developers in the Official Selection.

History

In the beginning…

The LudoNarraCon 2019 poster. Artwork by Will Kirkby

The first LudoNarraCon festival was held in April 2019. To our knowledge it was the first ever Steam festival, laying the foundation for what would become one of the most fundamental elements in indie game marketing just 12 months later.

The genesis of the event was in late 2018 as a solution to the challenges facing story-focused games in one of the dominant discovery channels of the time - physical game conventions. Conventions were one of the primary ways that players, media, influencers and platforms would discover indie games at this time but emotional narrative experiences were and are ill suited to the noisy and crowded show floors.

Like all good ideas, it was a combination of factors and contributions that inspired the concept including this need to replace physical conventions, a long-running desire to host narrative game panels at conventions and the way Steam had started to feature sales pages tied to major conventions like Gamescom. The catalyst though was a talk from Valve during the 2018 Melbourne International Games Week, at which they were encouraging developers to use their new store page streaming feature. Live for just a few months at this point, this feature enables developers to broadcast a stream to their store page, showing live gameplay or talking about the game. Only a handful of developers were using it initially but they were seeing increased engagement with their games and Valve was keen to drive greater uptake.

Coming away from this presentation and thinking about ways they could use the feature, the Fellow Traveller team had a revelation that Steam now offered everything they would need to replicate almost everything a physical convention offered but in digital form…

with an event page you could replicate the aspect of a convention hall to browse participating games
with digital demos you could replicate hands on opportunities for players
with store page streaming you could replicate the behind the scenes discussions and connections between developers and players
and the streaming would also enable an equivalent of the panels and discussions at events like PAX
media, platforms and others could browse and discover games

Following some initial fleshing out of these ideas, and coming up with the name LudoNarraCon (Ludo-narrative Convention), Fellow Traveller pitched the concept to the team at Valve and secured their support. Fellow Traveller then cancelled their plans to attend PAX East and committed to trialing the concept in April 2019.

The first LudoNarraCon featured 24 games and six panels on the main theatre stream. Most of the games taking part also streamed content to their store pages. At this time, digital demos on Steam were a rarity and something many developers were reluctant to offer. The conventional wisdom was that digital demos could hurt sales and they required more polish than a demo at a physical convention since the developer was not on hand to help the player or fix bugs in real time. Regardless, nine of the participating games were brave enough to put a demo live.

Valve not only supported the technical aspect of the broadcast, building the event page and creating new broadcast features to enable elements of the event, they also featured the event on their front page over the four days. The result was that over 850,000 Steam users visited the festival Steam page, many times the visitation of even the largest physical conventions. Participating titles saw hundred of demo players and thousands of wishlists, dwarfing the results they would expect from attending a regular event, whilst the games on sale experienced a significant boost in revenue.

2020, COVID and the explosion of Steam festivals…

LudoNarraCon 2020 poster. Art by Leonie Yue

Following this initial success and having proven the value of the concept to itself, other developers and Valve, Fellow Traveller committed to a shift away from physical events and to expand the festival for 2020 as well as promoting the idea of other developers or organisations following suit.

The plan for the 2020 event was to return in April of that year with more games in the official selection, more demos, double the theatre content and a dedicated sale section of more games that would be on discount. The proof point of the first edition helped to convince more developers to get on board but it was still a novel concept that needed a fair bit of explanation and there was still resistance to the idea of digital demos.

Little did we know that everything was about to change.

When the COVID pandemic hit in early 2020 the second edition of LudoNarraCon was just a couple of months away. Suddenly GDC was cancelled and Valve quickly put together their first official Steam Festival to feature games that would have been on display in San Francisco. Valve not only ran multiple Next Fests a year but also built out their event features to enable self-service creation and management of sale pages, improved broadcast tools and more. Rapidly other events sprung up, some by the now-cancelled physical conventions and some by other indie developers or publishers building on the model established by LudoNarraCon.

By the end of the pandemic, digital festivals had become one of the most effective ways to market your indie game. Releasing a digital demo had gone from a rarity to a critical component of almost every game’s development plan. In addition to three Next Fests a year, Valve also runs more than 20 themed festivals, each with a different focus e.g. Detective Fest. Independent event organisers hold a myriad of festivals around a variety of themes from types of game e.g. Tacticon to showcases of games from countries or regions.

Within this revolutionized landscape, LudoNarraCon continues to stand tall as one of the premier digital festivals on Steam, attracting more than 1.8million visits for its 2025 edition.