Digital Dragons online – a successful experiment

An exceptional, four-day-long edition of the Digital Dragons ended last Friday. 900 participants, 1100 businesses, 77 speakers, and 66 independent games in the Indie Showcase competition are only some data worth boasting.

This round has been an experiment from the start. Just like any organiser, we were faced with difficult decisions, and had to take up a challenge that nobody expected. However, it is with great pleasure that I can say that the Digital Dragons team stood up to the task perfectly, and prepared an event that was different than the previous ones had been yet satisfying the current needs of the game dev sector.

Wojciech Przybylski, CEO of the KPT

A record number of participants from 65 countries registered for the conference, with foreign entrants hailing from such countries as Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Finland, the US, France, Spain, and Canada, accounting for 35% of the whole audience. They were all able to participates in the lectures as the programme was constructed so as to account for various time zones. Another fact with mentioning is that 60% of the participants were game developers. Nearly 50% of speakers hailed from abroad, the programme comprised 62 sessions, 4 panels, and 3 roundtables, all with very highly appraised content level.

We are very keen on maintaining the functionalities that our participants find important and that are hallmarks of our event. That is why we organised the Expo Zone with 11 virtual stands of the partners, and 66 stands with indie games selected from among over 200 projects. Moreover, we provided space for recruiters, and 55 jobs in the sector to be filled were advertised.

Anna Krampus, Manager of the Games Sector Support Team

66 independent productions presented on key distribution platforms – Steam and GOG.com – competed for the title of the Best Indie Game. All the games participating in the competition offered demo versions on Steam, which made it possible to have each and every title tested and voted for through Community Vote. Over 50 hours of streaming and presence of famous international streamers certainly helped to promote the developers and their productions. The Digital Dragons Awards were presented at the Digital Dragons Gala Awards, which also included prizes for the best productions of 2019.

It was certainly a different event from the ones we used to know, yet it certainly helped us gather precious experience. In this way we are now furnished with new skills for organising the following editions, irrespective of the reality in which they will be held. We all very much hope that we will meet in Kraków next year, for what our participants missed most is precisely the opportunity of direct contact and talking face-to-face.

Anna Krampus

The Main Partner of Digital Dragons is the Małopolska Region: the regional authorities implementing a range of projects that serve innovation and economic development of Małopolska, and its attractiveness for investors. Małopolska is a perfect location for running business, particularly based on new technologies.

Organised by the Kraków Technology Park (KPT), the Digital Dragons conference is the key B2B event for the gamedev sector in this part of Europe. This year’s edition has been the ninth event gathering game developers, business partners, producers, publishers, and journalists from Poland and abroad.