san japan 2024
San Japan is an anime and gaming convention in San Antonio, Texas that I showed no signal at on August 30th to September 1st.
Although San Japan advertises itself at the largest anime and gaming convention, I would say that the event is catered to anime fans more than gaming fans. It’s also a very big event that happens to provide applications for free tables to indie game developers. It’s an event not too far away from Austin, so I applied and I got in.
plays
As the event was local, I was able to drive down on the day of the event and be there for the entirety of the event. I had forgotten to bring a second monitor on the first day, but thankfully a friend who came later on the first day provided a monitor for me. I also had enough space to occasionally have three people playing the game at once, as I brought two Steam Decks and one laptop.
Despite being a much bigger event (at an attendance of 28,033 people1, five times bigger than 2D Con’s ticket cap) and my ability to be present for the entire event, about the same number of people played the game as at 2D Con:
| Fr | Sa | Su |
|---|---|---|
| 9 | 18 | 17 |
I also received 34 wishlists on Steam that week:
| Fr | Sa | Su | Mo | Tu | We | Th |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14 | 10 | 5 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
I also did a stream on the official Godot Engine Twitch channel on the Thursday before the event though, which might account for some of the wishlist activity in the following week.
On the Thursday following the event, no signal had a total of 322 wishlists.
complaints
Unfortunately, placement at the event suffered from some familiar issues that I had previously run into at Delta H Con. Namely, the indie game dev space was not in the electronic games space for some reason. The video game hall at San Japan had arcade cabinets, a VR arcade, Pachinko, and something like 70 itashas. However, apparently there was not enough space for us, and we were placed in the adjacent hall next to the entrance for the electronic games space.
There were also a significant number of no-show tables, including a paid corner table, resulting in attendees not being able to recognize what the space was for and foot traffic generally passing by on their way to the video game room instead of being drawn in. Thankfully, staff/volunteers recognized that this presented a problem for attracting attendees to our space and I am very thankful to my point of contact for taking steps to mitigate this issue.
We were also not allowed to sell items at the event, so I decided to give out free physical copies of Gender Dysphoria to some of the people who played the game. It would be nice if we were allowed to sell, but I can’t complain too much since the table was free.
conclusion
I think that despite some of the issues at the event, I had a pretty good showing. It is kind of funny to me that between 2D Con and San Japan, the amount of reach I get is about the same despite their sizes being completely different as I had 40 and 44 plays respectively. Indeed, even after considering STAPLE!, where only 20 people played the game, it seems important to me now that I simply show up to as many events as possible regardless of size.
