The future of public game arts festivals and non-commercial games culture

Freeplay Parallels in 2024 in Naarm Melbourne, Australia

This year the oldest living art games non-profit in the world, Freeplay (Australia), announced they were like a year away from shutting down, so they're running a survey on what to do. They have some money, enough for one last conference, or one last showcase? Or should they do something else?

It's easy to see this as part of a broader global discourse about the future of non-commercial game arts events around the world. There used to be many more events, but now there's not. What's happening?

A lot of discussion happened on Bluesky, where it was instantly lost and forgotten in the churn of the feed. So I'm writing this post to archive / preserve some of that Discourse. I also want to add some of my own thoughts as an extra-special non-Australian outsider who visits occasionally.

someone playing a game at Freeplay Parallels 2024

First, here's Brendan Keogh's reactions, Dan Golding's reactions, and Leena van Deventer's reactions on Bluesky. Also here's recent Freeplay co-director Mads Mackenzie's blog post about event running and Freeplay board member Darcy W Smith's reactions. Some common points:

• Freeplay was an anti-institution that has "won" and thus has become an institution itself.
• If its mission is accomplished, then maybe it should end.
• If Freeplay got so big that volunteer labor feels exploitative, then maybe it's too big.
• Can Freeplay return to being a smaller ragtag thing? Maybe not.
• Let a thousand smaller events grow from Freeplay's ashes?

I see Mads' blog post as a data point for that last bit: while getting 10-20 people into a library meeting room is easy, it's much harder to grow from "smallest" to a "small" 50-100 person event.

Mads call this "The $1000 Problem": the event size / budget that is both too big and too small. For example it might cost $1000 to rent a decent-sized room with AV hookups, so to break even, you'd need 50 attendees to pay $20 each. But at that ticket price, everyone expects more than a room with folding chairs. So then you have to decorate the space, plan a schedule with a slate of presenters, or sell a lot more tickets in a bigger room, which will all cost more money, etc. Or run it as a series of many small events, but who's gonna plan and run all these events now?

Wonderville in Brooklyn, established 2019

One strategy: secure a space first.

Babycastles (RIP), Boshi's Place, Wonderville, Glitch City -- these game gallery / indie social spaces all operate(d) events out of a permanent-ish space with leases / diverse funding streams. So then the big event cost (the day's venue hire) drops to zero... sort of? In Melbourne, Bar SK (RIP) did the whole venue thing for a while, and now Sabby is going for it. LIKELIKE is the clever exception here, bootstrapped out of Paolo Pedercini's lovely garage, though he's also spoken on the strengths and weaknesses of his approach ("Can you be like LIKELIKE?")

Leasing a space seem to works OK for those 50-100 person sized events but if you're successful then you're also sort of trapped in that space too. If you want to grow bigger, you can't. Maybe that's OK. For reference, Freeplay runs much bigger events, with 1000+ people attending Parallels which costs about $100,000 AUD to run (huge venue + AV equipment?)

Big events, of course, have different space needs. Now Play This (London) recently wound down in 2025 (Holly Gramazio's wrap-up analysis blog post here) after a strong run in the colossal Somerset House. Even long-running events like IndieCade (Los Angeles) with its complex weekend invasion of Culver City have shifted to a mostly online-only format with occasional conferences at local colleges. Now A MAZE (Berlin) is maybe the last big physical game arts festival left. The future doesn't look great.

GAIA 2025 Scene Report (PDF) with a few information holes

But there is a future, it will just take some time to form, and it needs all our help. Game Arts International Network holds an annual Game Arts International Assembly to discuss these kinds of problems.

Conspicuously, Australia (and its vassal state Aotearoa New Zealand) are absent from GAIN's global scene map. As a somewhat recent expat / immigrant to this region, I feel a bit unqualified to provide an official "scene report" for Australia / New Zealand, but maybe someone from Freeplay should email them and start talking. Maybe host the 2026 symposium in Melbourne?

This is a bit of a global problem, so maybe the answer is a bit global too. Despite its problems, Freeplay is much more developed than most game arts orgs in the rest of the world, and probably has a lot to teach everyone else.

In return, well, Australia (and especially New Zealand) often crave international recognition, especially from the rest of the West, and so some diplomacy might help Freeplay with impressing the local government, and maybe secure some local public funding / weather local political headwinds...

"'Cultural heart' broken as arts bodies' funding axed", The Australian, January 3rd, 2026

Harrison Polites wrote "How Freeplay, one of Australia’s leading indie videogame orgs, missed out on government funding" linking Freeplay's problems to a wider Victorian (Australia) arts funding crisis:

"In its original grant application in 2022, for the Creative Ventures Program, Freeplay was competing against other grassroots arts organisations. [...] That grant, however, was discontinued, leading Freeplay to apply for the much broader Creative Enterprises Program. [... The] results of this latest grant process upset many in the broader arts community, as several other institutions that also banked on Creative Victoria grant funding also missed out."

Zainab Darbas explores further local game dev sentiment about the Australian game funding landscape in "Commercialisation, community, and culture: A production perspective on public arts funding for video games in Australia" (2025) -- here's a key quote:

“The big frustration there is that most of the good events stuff in games is the grassroots stuff. And there's this really annoying push-pull thing there where the grassroots stuff isn’t formalised enough for the government to want to fund it, but then formalising it is either out of reach without the funding or formalising it will kill it.”

(Note that "Formalization" is a strong theme in Brendan Keogh's The Game Industry Does Not Exist (2023) with its Australian indie context.)

Coincidentally, all this Australian games festival shutdown discourse is happening at the same time as another Australian festival shutdown discourse -- the Adelaide Writers Week -- which had an estimated attendance of 160,000 people last year, just a little bigger than Freeplay.

Adelaide Writers' Week when it isn't imploding

And also coincidentally, the co-founder of Now Play This and SUPER FAMOUS AMAZING BEST-SELLING NOVELIST Holly Gramazio recently wrote about the her unique double-experience of being both a local who loved this big giant writers festival, as well as an international guest anxiously backing out of the big giant writers mess. I'll quote the love part:

"Most of the events at AWW are free, and happen outdoors, in the parklands near the city centre. A little walk from the city library and the university in one direction and the train station in the other. It is so central and easy to get to. It is so straightforward to just wander along for an hour or two and see what’s happening. You can bring a sandwich from home or a pie from the shop in the station. You don’t have to buy their official vendor coffee, you don’t have to plan what you’re doing days in advance, you don’t have to feel confident or sure that you’re meant to be there, you can just go."

If Freeplay needs to change, here's my uninformed outsider tourist opinion: keep the recognizable brand and scale and knowhow, but try to morph into some other nonprofit games event thing that's big and hard?

What type of big events can only a big experienced formalized org like Freeplay do, besides Parallels or Angles? What new experiments can they try for $30,000 again, each year for the next three years, long enough to have another shot at the arts funding lottery?

Night Games at IndieCade 2015... running Killer Queen maybe? photo by Scott Chamberlin

What if Freeplay tried to scale super huge and super public and semi-normie like AWW, a constellation of "approachable" events -- a mix of big public stuff like Now Play This and Come Out And Play and AWW-style parkside dev talks, with IndieCade Night Games stuff after dark?

Or maybe it could become like an Australian MAGFest, a weirder gayer alternative to PAX with more music and performance? (This is one of A MAZE's key strengths -- linking games to a broader nightlife / music / performance scene. Comedian cross-over has been an emerging trend in commercial indie games too, where Earth Must Die got various big British comedians like Little Alex Horne etc. and Pro Jank Footy has enlisted Aunty Donna.)

"Killing GDC" is a long-held dream of the entire game industry outside the US. But you're not going to murder GDC by disbanding one of the biggest non-US game arts orgs. What would a less evil "GDC Freeplay Festival of Gaming" pivot look like? As GDC changes, so must the anti-GDCs too.

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... Well, anyway, it's easy enough for me to say all this shit. I don't live there and I don't have to do anything, except when Melbourne saves enough MP to summon me every few years.

Fortunately for all of us, Australian indies love to haul out all their messy problems for the world to see. Just the fact that Freeplay is being so transparent with its numbers is wild to me, like I don't think any other game festival would ever willingly invite all this discourse about itself. If this "leaked" at an American games festival, they'd all be treating it as a PR crisis.

So even if I don't know much right now, I'm sure I'm going to hear about it all eventually. "She'll be right." Everyone give Keogh good quotes for the next book, OK?