BIC Festival: 부산인디커넥트페스티벌

Global Indie Game Festival for Indie Game Developers and Gamers

The Busan Indie Connect Festival, which started in 2015, is a global indie game event held in Busan every year. Celebrating its 9th edition this year, the Busan Indie Connect Festival will take place at BEXCO Exhibition Center Hall 1 in Busan from August 25th to 27th. For the online component, it will be held from August 17th to September 14th.

#Expanding Event Scale with a Professional Exhibition Convention, BEXCO

In a gaming industry that is highly polarized, it has become more important than ever to foster a ladder of growth from startups to small and medium-sized enterprises, creating a sustainable game ecosystem. Indie games, based on fresh ideas and originality, serve as an important foundation for entrepreneurship, and the indie game industry is expanding every year. Reflecting this trend, the BIC Festival continues to increase in scale each year. With this year's edition, the BIC Festival aims to achieve its largest exhibition to date by relocating the event venue to BEXCO, a professional exhibition convention center, expecting to enhance convenience for both developers and gamers while ensuring qualitative growth of the exhibition.

#Non-Competitive Booth Sales for Public and Educational Institutions

The BIC Festival has maintained its original spirit of direct communication between developers and gamers, providing more exhibition opportunities for developers and creating a platform for communication between developers and gamers. In order to provide more exhibition opportunities, this year introduces the "non-competitive booths" for the first time, targeting public and educational institutions, starting with a limited scale to prevent excessive booth setups. Applications are open until June for the A-type booths, which can exhibit up to 8 works, and the B-type booths, which can exhibit up to 12 works. Detailed information can be found on the official website of the BIC Festival (https://bicfest.org/).

#Enhanced Global Promotion Support for Indie Games

For the promotion of domestic indie games, the BIC Festival has been continuously supporting specialized indie game postings for six years since 2018. Additionally, it has been producing indie game-focused content through virtual influencers on platforms like YouTube, which serve as an entry point for the MZ generation, to expand the promotion of indie games. This year, to enhance the global promotion of indie games, the festival plans to recruit English-speaking virtual influencers and create multilingual short-form content. Furthermore, it can be observed that approximately 84% of the exhibited works in the previous BIC Festival were PC-based, indicating a shift of the indie game market from the saturated mobile game market towards the PC game market. To accommodate this trend, the BIC Festival has newly opened the "BIC Curated Page" on Steam this year, diversifying its promotional channels for the growing number of PC-based games.


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