XP Game Summit 2026, Part 1
Our entire lives changed by a 2-day game industry event
June 11 marks the anniversary of our first XP Game Summit. This incredible game industry event permanently changed the direction of our lives. What’s wild is how accidental it all was.
Just after we started Noodle Goose Games, I opened TikTok and saw an interview with Sean Browning from Starspray Studios talking about his game, Retroronto, and something about it stuck.
From there, I found Sean's Discord community and noticed Sean posting that he’d be showing his game at XP Game Summit. That was our first real “okay… we should probably go see what’s happening in this industry” moment.
XP Game Summit stood out immediately because it wasn’t about playing games; it was about the business of games, which was the part of the industry we knew the least about and was the most important to our success this past year.
We hesitated. We weren’t really a “game studio” in the traditional sense and we weren’t sure if we belonged there, or what we could possibly contribute.
And then we remembered: we’re podcasters of a video game podcast! So we registered as media attendees and went in as brand new studio founders stepping into an industry event we barely understood…and it completely surprised us.
We met other indie studios and developers who were building not just games, but entire businesses and communities. Conversations with them made the idea of building a video game feel actually possible. What made things even more surreal was that someone applied to join our studio on the second day of the summit. This moment is what made us feel like our new company was more than an idea.
Since that first summit, Noodle Goose Games has grown substantially and so has XP Game Summit. When we returned in 2026, just one year later, there were more studios, more attendees, more vendors, more conversations happening in every direction. The energy felt bigger, but also more focused, like an ecosystem maturing.
And somewhere in all of that, between meetings, booths, hallway conversations, and chance encounters, we could feel how much things had changed in a year. Not just for the industry, but for us inside it.
We got so much value out of the summit as returnees in 2026 as well. Armed with new knowledge acquired from all the programs we learned about during our first summit, we were able to make deeper connections and bigger partnerships than ever before!
Follow us on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/noodle-goose to stay up to date and access part 2 of our anniversary blog that covers the indie game studio showcase at the summit!