AdventureX 2024 Steam event is underway!

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Features by Adventure Game Hotspot staff
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Who's ready for another game convention? No, it's not quite time for another Adventure Game Fan Fair (soon, soon), but it IS time for the next AdventureX! This year, though, after a particularly challenging year, the popular UK narrative games convention will look a little different than usual. We'll let our friends from the AdventureX team themselves share what's been happening, and what to expect from this year's digital event on Steam, running this week only, from November 4 - 11, 2024. We'll be tuning in for sure, and with so many great games on display, and so many wonderful panels and speakers lined up, we hope you will too!

AdventureX is the UK's only convention dedicated to story-driven gaming. Despite being entirely run by volunteers for no profit, AdventureX has grown over the years, and had the honour of hosting exhibits, talks and panels featuring some of the most influential and engaging people working within the narrative games industry and beyond. Encompassing everything from retro pixel hunts to rich, branching narratives, AdventureX is a celebration of creativity, indie development and geek culture.

In March 2024, Tom Cole (the head organiser of AdventureX from 2016 to 2023) informed the rest of the volunteer team that he was stepping down from his role in the event's organisation due to a lack of time to focus on it. At that point, we publicly announced that due to team changes and related loss of our previous venue (the University of Greenwich, London), there would be no physical conference this year, but instead we would be organising a digital event instead.

The remaining volunteer team for AdventureX then started looking into options to reorganise and move forward towards future events. We formed a new organisational team with Stephen Brown as director and treasurer, Tom Hardwidge as director and organizer, and Amy Tant as lead organiser.

At that point, we actually did our best to pursue leads in hopes of finding a new venue in time to still make an in-person 2024 event happen, but by the middle of June it was clear that we did not have enough time to overcome all the obstacles we were facing. It was decided that we would focus on organizing our annual Steam event as usual, to benefit both narrative game developers and players, and make that platform a digital method of showcasing this year's selection of AdventureX games.

Unfortunately, it took until September to get the ball rolling on all of this, and when we started the application period for showcasing games this year, we received about 500 game submissions, which is over 5 times what we had ever received in any previous year (the most was about 90 in 2023), which was definitely unexpected. We did anticipate an increase in submissions due to the event being digital and only requiring that developers have their game on Steam, but we underestimated just how many people would be interested in participating in our 2024 Steam event. While mindblowing, it also meant that we had to close the submission period early and find a lot more volunteers to help us with the playtesting and review process each game undergoes before the final selection is made by our committee. But we got it done!

Out of 500 games, 35 were selected as regular exhibitors – narratively driven games which are newly released or upcoming and are/might be flying under the radar relative to all of the AAA and big indie games that claim most of the attention on Steam. It is one of AdventureX's main goals to support smaller indie devs/teams that deserve the spotlight. Ten were selected as "honourable mentions," which are games that already have a high profile and critical/commercial success but are nonetheless worthy of inclusion and recommendation due to being of particular note in the narrative games space.

The 2024 AdventureX Steam sale starts on Monday, November 4th at 6 PM GMT and runs until the 11th! Featuring over 140 games, it includes this year's selection of narrative games as well as past exhibitors. Brought to you with the support of Application Systems Heidelberg and Articy.

Additionally, we have curated a broadcast of past talks and panels which runs for a few hours during each day of the Steam event (see the schedule on the Steam event page), and more importantly, on Thursday, November 7th starting at 6 PM GMT we will broadcast a track of new, original, live and pre-recorded talks, panels and developer interviews as our 2024 digital alternative to the in-person event's talks and panels track.

Last but not least, the 2024 AdvXJam game jam runs from November 15 - 29, 2024. The itch.io jam page will be available soon for sign-up. This brings back the game jam event we hosted in 2020 and 2021 as an alternative to the in-person event at the time due to COVID.

We will do our very best to organise our next in-person event in 2025. Details to come early next year.

- The AdventureX team