Our PAX West 2025 Round-up
We have returned (and recovered 😅) from our first-ever PAX West, and we wanted to share our takeaways from the event! Let's get into it!
What is PAX West? Why did we go?
PAX West is an annual gaming convention in Seattle, Washington, that celebrates gaming culture with panels, tournaments, live events, and an expo hall with publishers and developers showing off their products or demos. We wanted to show the new alpha build of The Rabbit Haul to a new audience at PAX West, and it didn’t disappoint! We made so many new fans and friends during the event, and we had a blast showing all the cool new things that we added to the game. PAX was also a great place to meet press and content creators to help spread the word about our monthly playtests. As we are gearing up towards a public demo on Steam (date TBD), we want to have as many people play the game to make it the best it can be. I think we were successful in that goal! We want to thank Edmonton Screen for their financial support. If you are an Edmonton studio, be sure to check out their funding programs!
What We Brought and our goals for PAX West 2025
To try and make the most out of PAX West, we had a few initiatives to help drive attention to our booth and boost Steam Wishlists:
- We teamed up with four other studios for an Indie Stamp Rally where PAX attendees could win a TV, Steam gift cards, and game codes by collecting stamps and entering a raffle. You should check out their games:
- Our popular hair sprouts (let's go #sproutsquad!) returned after being such a hit at Gamescom, alongside postcards with game information to give away to attendees.
- Partnered with a PR agency to help secure influencer coverage during PAX West.
- We live-posted on social media during PAX West to keep up with everything exciting that was going on.
If you participated in the Indie Stamp Rally raffle, the prizes have been drawn and the winners contacted. Thank you for participating!
Since this was our first time at PAX West, our goals were:
- Meet with press and influencers
- Collect feedback from playtests at the booth
- Spread the word about our monthly playtests in Discord
- Grow our community
- Make new developer/industry friends!
What did we take away?
- The hair sprouts we’re just as big a hit at PAX West as at Gamescom. 🌱
- We were awarded Saturday’s Best of PAX West 2025 from KujoPrime (Kurosh Jozavi)
- PAX is a great event to meet with press and influencers. Compared to other trade shows, media attendees have a recognizable badge that makes it easy to spot media on the showfloor.
- PAX West and its Steam festival, including all of our efforts leading up and during the event got us ~2000 wishlists.
- Attendees love raffles and prizes, and we had a total of 212 entries to our raffles. Among other prizes, the TV we bought for the booth was a huge hit! (We didn’t want to bring the TV back to Canada).
- We gained 72 newsletter subscribers from the Stamp Rally (hello and welcome!), and about 100 followers across social media and Discord. We’re happy to have you here!
We were also able to gain some event coverage. Here are some highlights:
- TechRaptor (USA) put us on a list of 11 games you should add to your Wishlist
- Chelora (Canada) stopped by to interview us
- GG’s Game Room (Australia) put us on their YouTube thumbnail and list of 9 unique Steam games you NEED on your Wishlist
Final Thoughts
We hope you enjoyed our insights from our experience at PAX West 2025! We enjoyed seeing how much support there was for our game and getting to meet and talk with a bunch of you.
We have lots of exciting updates coming down the pipeline, and we can’t wait to share more with you soon! If you haven’t, please make sure to Wishlist The Rabbit Haul on Steam to help support us (and tell your friends too!), join our Discord to keep up to date on future playtest announcements, and follow us on social media for even more fun and exciting content!
Until next time 👋