To some extent, the Penny Arcade Expo, as a video game show, was defined by who wasn’t there.
Nintendo was at PAX, technically, running its separate Live show in a sealed-off part of the Seattle Convention Center’s Arch building. While many PAX attendees made time to hit both, having access to one event didn’t mean you got access to the other. The two simply co-existed without directly interacting.
Other than that, most of the video game industry’s major players were no-shows last weekend at PAX. Microsoft wasn’t there at all, Sony was reportedly only present via an off-the-books appearance by PlayStation Indies chief Shuhei Yoshida, and if Valve was at PAX, they weren’t obvious about it.
The only real representation at PAX from the big, mainstream end of the games industry — the part that’s usually called “AAA” by analysts — came from the Japanese third-party studios Bandai Namco and Sega/Atlus.
This is arguably part of a larger trend that’s been going on for a while, independently of PAX. For the last few years, many of the big studios in the games industry have been doing much of their own consumer outreach, through branded livestreams, scheduled broadcasts, and other direct marketing methods. This includes Microsoft’s Xbox Directs, Sony’s PlayStation Showcases, Nintendo’s pre-recorded Direct livestreams, and Valve’s near-complete refusal to care about press coverage.
That trend is part of what’s led to the slow demise of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). As recently as 2018, E3 was the big event on the American games industry’s calendar. Now, it’s been canceled for the last thee years running, and right after PAX, news came down that E3 lost its organizer for 2024. E3 as an event might simply be gone for good.
This has all ended up working out in the Penny Arcade Expo’s favor. Back in 2019, when I attended both E3 and PAX West in the same year, it felt like the one made the other irrelevant. As GeekWire contributor Nicole Tanner argued, PAX was dominated by big game publishers, which used up a lot of oxygen in the room that could’ve gone to smaller studios.
Now, in 2023, most of those big publishers have taken their ball and gone home, which has left PAX as a show that’s by and for independent game developers, almost by default. The 2023 show had two separate expo halls that were bursting with new indie projects, as well as an entire separate floor that was strictly dedicated to tabletop gaming.
It’s an effective evolution from the stripped-down feel of PAX 2021, where a relative handful of smaller developers took the spotlight by virtue of being the only people who showed up.
PAX 2023 was effectively one big indie expo, with new projects that ranged from one-person projects looking for exposure to mid-level publishers showcasing their upcoming holiday lineups.
This included Devolver Digital, which was at PAX to exhibit two games, Gunbrella and Wizard With A Gun; Los Angeles-based PM Studios; cozy game publisher Whitethorn Games; horror-themed company Dread XP; Serenity Forge; and Larian Studios, which came to the show to promote this summer’s hit Dungeons & Dragons adaptation Baldur’s Gate 3.
I also saw several different studios that were either looking for a publisher to help them bring their game to market, or which had done so after exhibiting at the last couple of expos. Both Cricket and Echoes of the Plum Grove from PAX 2022 reappeared at the 2023 show with new publishing deals in place, and Max Trest’s Astrolander has since become a console exclusive for the PlayStation 5.
At the same time, I saw enough publishers and their representatives roaming around the show floor that it painted an interesting picture. If PAX has effectively become an indie show, where smaller developers can come to pitch their games to both fans and potential funding partners, then it’s filling an interesting, vital niche in the modern industry. The biggest companies in the business are apparently happy to do their own marketing and even occasionally hold their own events, like BlizzCon; it’d be great if PAX was the show for everyone else.
Another element of that which came into greater focus recently is that PAX has managed to dodge the problems that have confronted a couple of other recent nerd shows, such as the Emerald City Comic Con. PAX is always firmly focused on gaming, in one way or another, without any slumming celebrities or nostalgia trips to slow its roll. Its identity is secure.
All of this seemed to resonate with this year’s audience. Every retailer I spoke to at this year’s PAX said it was a good to great year for them. Cody Spencer, co-owner of Seattle’s Pink Gorilla chain of used-game stores, went so far as to tell me that it had been a “record year” for his booth at the show.
There were really only two sour notes, from where I was standing. One was that roughly a third of the show was in Arch, with most of the rest of PAX spread out across the new Summit building. I had a lot of appointments at PAX, so I spent a lot of my free time sprinting from Arch to Summit, or vice versa.
While I’m obviously an edge case, it would’ve been a better show overall if PAX had copied the layout from SakuraCon 2023. Arch could’ve been saved for space-intensive activities like the arcade setup, with the newer Summit building reserved for the show’s expo halls and panels. As it was, it felt like one big expo hall was inexplicably split between two buildings a block apart.
The other issue is that, in conjunction with state guidelines, PAX relaxed its health and safety measures for this year’s show. Only about half the attendees and exhibitors I saw were masked. Frankly, I’d hoped for better.
Even with Washington state’s relatively low COVID rates at time of writing, the masking policies from the last two year’s shows meant that, for once in my life, I could go to a convention without catching “con crud” a few days later. I’d hoped that masks would become the new normal, at least for potential epidemics like the average nerd expo, but it’s not quite there.
That aside, PAX West feels like a convention that’s in transition. Five years ago, I wrote about my first time at the show, where I criticized PAX for embodying the same consumer culture that the “Penny Arcade” comic strip used to parody.
As it’s been forced to move further away from big mainstream coverage, both due to industry trends and as part of the lockdown fallout, PAX has also steadily become a more worthwhile show to attend. If the future of the Penny Arcade Expo is as an international flashpoint for independent games development, then it’s all been worth it.
