Despite the gaming industry’s difficult year, Seattle Indies is gearing up for this year’s SLICE conference to be the biggest iteration of the event yet.
SLICE 2026 — the conference’s name stands for Seattle Loves Indie Creators Expo — is Seattle Indies’ annual B2B event designed for indie and double-A video game developers. The first-ever SLICE brought over 900 attendees to Seattle’s McCaw Hall venue for a day of panels, networking, and practical workshops. Based on current ticket sale trends for this year’s iteration of SLICE, which will take place on Sept. 2, the conference’s organizers anticipate over 1,100 attendees, according to Seattle Indies vice president Ty Taylor in an interview with GamesBeat.
“It’s bigger: 20 percent more people expected, 20 percent more tracks,” Taylors said. “We have another entire track, another floor of this giant opera house — just more.”
Seattle Indies’ B2B indie gaming conference is taking place during a particularly challenging period for the gaming industry, which has seen waves of layoffs at both triple-A and indie studios over the past year. Taylor and his fellow SLICE organizers Tim Cullings and Olga Sheverieva said the state of the industry was at top of mind when they planned the event’s program, with sessions specifically intended to help game makers entering the indie scene better understand how to build a business in the space.
“We are seeing even more layoffs, and even more people are very confused about what to do next with their careers,” Sheverieva said in an interview with GamesBeat. “For a lot of those people, starting their own company is basically an alternative career path — and sometimes not even an alternative career path. Sometimes, it’s the only career path in order for them to stay in the industry.”
To make SLICE 2026 more accessible to beleaguered game developers, the conference is offering a half-off discount on tickets to any recently laid-off devs, with no code needed to qualify — just an honor system. So far, these discounted passes have accounted for roughly 10 percent of SLICE’s ticket sales, according to Taylor.
“In the tumultuous time our industry is going through, it is local, targeted events like SLICE that bring our development community together,” said Seattle Indies board member Jon Kimmich in a written statement shared with GamesBeat via email. “Sharing wisdom, pain, knowledge, technique and hope. For great games, and better ways to put them in the hands of eager players.”
The SLICE organizers cautioned against the idea that indie gaming represents an easy offramp for triple-A developers recently laid off from corporate roles, with dedicated talks intended to address this perception featuring speakers like Dragon Snacks Games chief executive officer Jen MacLean.
“We know that indies are not going to replace 10,000 jobs; this is not a thing that can happen,” Cullings said. “But we will keep the people who want to be here, and do what we can to support them.”
Cullings described SLICE as part of a “three-pillar strategy” that Seattle Indies has been working on for the last few years, including building a leading industry conference for indie studios, establishing a physical space for Seattle Indies, and helping launch a professional association for indie game developers. Sheverieva cited numbers from the Washington State Department of Commerce saying Washington ranks second among U.S. states for commercial gaming revenue, generating roughly $14 billion annually, and that Washington’s games industry supports over 27,000 jobs in the state, with notable local indie studios including PlayEveryWare, Mega Crit Games, Aggro Crab, and QAG.
“We need these founders who are coming to SLICE to also be putting their voices behind it, because the Valves and the Microsofts don’t need that kind of support — they have an army of lawyers and lobbyists — but indies and double-A studios certainly do,” Cullings said.