Two days of queue times at Taipei Game Show: the three longest lines, two of them indie
Queue length is the honest metric. The longest this year was 95 minutes.
We walked the floor for two days and counted the queue at every booth on the hour, then converted it to a wait time.
The three longest: a homegrown indie action game (95 minutes), a Japanese major release (80 minutes), and a two-player co-op puzzler (65 minutes). Two of the three come from teams of under ten people.
Big booths are big. That does not make the line long
The majors have ten times the floor space and many more stations, so their queues clear faster — a short wait does not mean fewer people. The real variable is whether there is a reason you have to play it now, and this year that reason was usually “I have seen it online but never played it”.
The indie teams all did the same thing: keep the demo to eight or ten minutes, and hand out a physical card at the end with a wishlist QR code. They say the conversion is far better than last year.
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Practical advice: for the popular booths, go in the first hour or the last. The three hours in the middle are the worst of the day.
