Indie game festivals and showcases: which to enter and when

Festivals for indie games come in four shapes, and they ask for different things. Steam fests are run by Valve on the store itself. Digital festivals are run by curators and communities, and some of them take the form of a Steam event page. Streamed showcases present a selection of games in a broadcast. Expos put your game on a show floor in person.

The howtomarketagame.com directory tracks open calls across all of them, with the deadline, the fee and the month of each event, and flags the ones that are awards, physical expos or limited to a region¹. In early November 2026 it listed 163 calls, and 143 of them were free to enter¹.

Next Fest is built around playable demos of unreleased games², and a title may join only one edition, ever³. It has its own deadlines and strategy, covered in the Next Fest guides linked below.

Themed fests are the ones most developers overlook. Valve runs them around a genre or a theme through the year, and while discounted games are prioritised, free games, games in Coming Soon and games with demos are also welcome to participate². The 2027 calendar already lists fests from a Shop Keeper Fest in January to a Real-Time Strategy Fest in May². If your game fits a theme, it is a free placement on a Steam page built for exactly your audience.

Seasonal sales are a separate thing: any game released at least 30 days before the sale is welcome to join with a discount².

Showcases are curated, and the selection criteria are worth reading before you apply. Day of the Devs, for example, says a playable full or demo build is ideal at submission but does not need to be publicly playable, and that games are picked by a team of industry experts weighing what is new and exciting about the game, whether it has been showcased elsewhere, and whether the team can provide assets in time for the show⁴.

The asset list arrives after selection and it is not small. Day of the Devs asks selected games for a hi-res logo, gameplay footage or trailers, a 2 to 3 minute introduction video and a fact sheet, among other items⁴. A team that already has these on hand is a team the organisers can rely on.

The calls that do charge are a mix of expos, awards and some digital events. In the directory, the stated fees ran from 10 euros to $600 in early November 2026¹, and a physical expo adds a booth, travel and the days away from development on top of any entry fee.

An expo is valuable for what happens in person: meeting publishers and press, watching strangers play, and building a network in a region. Judge one against those goals rather than against the wishlists it brings, which a free digital festival of the right theme can often match without the travel.

Calls are spread across the year. In the directory in early November 2026, every month had events, from 3 in March to 18 in September and in October¹. There is no single season to aim for, which means the work is keeping a pipeline rather than hitting one date.

Prepare the assets once. Most applications ask for some combination of a store page, a trailer, screenshots, a short description and a playable build, and a demo is the asset that opens the most doors, since Valve describes customers as generally using a demo to make a purchase decision⁵.

Track deadlines, not event dates. Applications close before the event, often well before it, and the directory offers a daily email of calls closing in the next 1 to 7 days¹.