Nintendo’s April 2024 Indie World Showcase was a 20-minute presentation of games from independent developers coming to Switch sometime in 2024, with several previously announced games getting release dates.

It was a fairly low-key showcase overall, although there were definitely some choice nuggets in there.

Below you’ll find the video of the full Indie World Showcase April 2024 presentation, plus every individual game announcement with a trailer, a date, and a link to our more detailed coverage.

Nintendo Indie World Showcase April 2024 – The Whole Presentation

First, the presentation itself if you want the whole thing:

Every Switch Game Announcement & Update

And now every trailer for every game from the April 2024 Indie World Showcase, plus some blurb and a link to our coverage if there is one:

Little Kitty, Big City – 9th May 2024

Will you make your way home or will you explore what the big city has to offer first? I mean, getting home is obviously your main priority. Obviously. Well, it’s one of your priorities. Maybe more of a guideline… It’s definitely on your To-Do list somewhere! But first? Exploration!

Yars Rising – 2024

Play as the young hacker, Emi Kimura, as she starts to uncover the dark secrets of mysterious corporation, Qotech. In this brand new side-scrolling Metroidvania from acclaimed developers, WayForward, take the Yars universe to a whole new level and unlock something hiding deep inside of you.

Refind Self: The Personality Test Game – Summer 2024

Games can really show someone’s personality, don’t you think? By way of a simple exploration-based adventure, this data-science game analyzes your actions to estimate your personality.

Sticky Business – 17th August 2024

Sticky Business is a creative relaxing 2D game developed by Spellgarden Games. Players will create stickers, pack orders, and listen to the stories of customers. Sticky Business is available now for Nintendo Switch, Mac, and PC alongside its DLC.

Antonblast – 12th November 2024

ANTONBLAST is an explosive, action-packed retro platformer featuring a destructive twist to classic gameplay and a lovingly hand-animated pixel aesthetic inspired by the Game Boy Advance, blown up and reimagined for the modern era!

Silky smooth 60fps action platforming and explosive escapes combine in a bombastic adventure. Blast through buildings, fight your demons, and explore wonky worlds in ANTONBLAST!

Valley Peaks – 2024

The mountains are calling! In this ribbiting first-person climbing platformer, each mountain is like a puzzle, and it’s your job to make your way to the top of every ridge to place radio towers for the froggy inhabitants of Valley Peaks.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes – 16th May 2024

A woman, summoned by an eccentric man to participate in a project in an old hotel somewhere in central Europe, becomes embroiled in a game of illusions, increasingly dangerous and surreal.
Now you are invited to fall into the same rabbit hole, in a non-linear mystery with an immense amount of handcrafted puzzles, constantly presenting you with new riddles to solve, each leading you closer to deciphering the enigma of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes.

Europa – 2024

On the moon Europa, a lush terraformed paradise in Jupiter’s shadow, an android named Zee sets out in search of answers. Run, glide and fly across the landscape, solve mysteries in the ruins of a fallen utopia, and discover the story of the last human alive.

TMNT: Splintered Fate – July 2024

Join the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as they rescue Splinter from the clutches of the Foot Clan amidst chaos in NYC. Experience fast-paced, roguelike action with unique powers for each Turtle. Team up with friends for co-op gameplay, explore iconic locations, and face classic TMNT foes. Don’t miss the adrenaline-packed adventure in this FIGHT, ADAPT, REPEAT portal loop! Subscribe now for updates and get ready to restore peace to the city!

Cat Quest III – 8th August 2024

Ahoy, ye brave buccaneers and fearless feline adventurers!
Prepare to weigh anchor on August 8th as Cat Quest III hoists its sails! 🏴‍☠️😸 Embark on a voyage through the Purribean and clash swords with the notorious Pi-rats. There is no better way to celebrate International Cat Day.

Take command of yer own sea vessel, meow-ster the waves, and plunder yer way through this swashbucklin’ catventure! Join forces with yer matey for local co-op play, and together, turn the tides of fate!

Will ye be the one to discover the mythical North Star? Set paw on the path to glory!

stitch. – Today (17th April 2024)

Stitch. is a casual puzzle game with embroidery on a numbered grid. The main objective is to fill in the levels’ areas with no gaps to complete Hoops.

Stitch. lets you create beautiful embroidery patterns, by solving levels and Hoops of various difficulties and sizes. It’s easy to learn, but hard to master!

Stitch up all the beautiful landscapes, plants, animals, objects, and more.

BZZZT – Summer 2024

Become a tiny ZX8000 robot and begin your journey through a beautiful, pixel-art world inspired by games iconic to the platformer genre. Follow a surprising story, upgrade your skills, beat challenging levels, and compete with other players for the fastest speedrun!

SCHiM – 18th July 2024

Embark on a playful journey in SCHiM and get ready to jump from shadow to shadow. This 3D platformer integrates light, shadow, and animation into its gameplay.
Interact with the shadows you visit in a colorful environment and be part of the stories that unfold. Every object, living being, and thing has a “schim”. You play as a schim who becomes separated. Can you make it back to your human and help others along the way?

Animal Well – 9th May

Hatch from your flower and spelunk through the beautiful and sometimes haunting world of ANIMAL WELL, a pixelated action-exploration game rendered in intricate audio and visual detail. Encounter lively creatures small and large, helpful and ominous as you discover unconventional upgrades and unravel the well’s secrets. This is a truly unique experience that can make you laugh in fear, surprise, or delight.

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami – 23rd May 2024

Solving crime is no walk in the pond. You are a down-on-his-luck detective who also happens to be a duck. Use your powers of de-duck-tion to inspect evidence, fill in the blanks, and bust the case wide open, in a narrative mystery adventure where nothing is quite as it seems.

Another Crab’s Treasure – 25th April 2024

In a vibrant undersea kingdom on the verge of collapse, a hermit crab embarks on a treasure hunt to buy back his repossessed shell. The second game from AGGRO CRAB.

SteamWorld Heist II – 8th August 2024

Get ready to join Captain Leeway and set sail on the Great Sea in this turn-based strategy game. Bullets ricochet with deadly precision as you go on heists to find epic loot, whilst trying to figure out just what is causing the water crisis. Put together your rag-tag Steambot crew and sail across the sea to uncover the mysteries that surround you!

Let us know below what you thought of the latest Indie World Showcase by voting in the polls below and dropping us a comment.

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With cord cutters and streamers becoming more selective about where they invest their subscription dollars and the costs of premium services like Netflix
NFLX
rising, FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV) services that offer thick bundles of niche channels and vintage content are on the rise with consumers. One of the more interesting contenders is Plex, a privately-held company that started in the late aughts as an app to help video enthusiasts organize and share their home libraries. Plex expanded into the FAST space in 2018, and today announced it has surpassed a thousand channels (1112, in fact, including a just-announced NFL Channel) in its free-to-stream lineup, making it one of the largest inventories in the market.

The rising popularity of the FAST model, which also appeals to advertisers looking to combine the sizzle of a 30-second spot with the data targeting of an online platform, has drawn a lot of players into the space, each with its own spin on a service that can appear very similar to viewers. After all, how many channels of British murder mysteries, 2000s-era prestige shows and Hallmark tearjerkers can providers squeeze through a fiberoptic cable before viewers cease to care exactly where it’s coming from?

The companies that emerge on top need to deliver a unique and special experience for consumers, combined with a strong value proposition for advertisers. Each big player comes with its own advantages: Roku’s OTT experience, Tubi’s origins as an ad-tech platform, Samsung and LG’s ownership of the TV interface, Amazon
AMZN
Prime’s connection to consumers, and so on. Plex’s edge, according to the company’s executives, is its community.

“We began as a personal media management software,” said Plex CEO Keith Valory, who joined the company in 2012 at the invitation of co-founder and current chief product officer Scott Olechowski. “Eventually, we thought that the more interesting problem to solve over time is media chaos. People shouldn’t have to go to 20 different apps to get the content they want.”

Valory says Plex had grown a fanbase of hardcore videophiles who use the product to keep track of extensive media libraries. These enthusiasts pushed the company to develop rich capabilities around content management, discovery, recommendations, reviews and shareability, which turn out to be important differentiators when viewers are faced with thousands of choices.

Valory says he and Olechowski began building the framework for the AVOD (ad-supported video on demand) strategy in 2017, doing business development deals with studios and building relationships. They launched the service in 2019, just in time to benefit from the COVID streaming boom. “We launched our FAST channels and continued to accelerate the business,” he said. Over time, Plex has added live content, sports and hyperlocal channels to the service, which is available in over 180 countries worldwide, offered through the familiar Plex interface.

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According to Gavin Bridge, VP of Media Research for CPG Global and a FAST-focused analyst who tracks the number of FAST channels in the United States via his monthly FASTMaster report, there were more than 1,963 FAST channels in the U.S. alone as of March 2024. Currently, Plex accounts for 847 of them, and it’s growing every day.

Building click-appeal for viewers is one part of the FAST equation, but the other critical component is serving that audience up to advertisers in the narrowest, most targeted slices possible. Every FAST platform has its own proprietary algorithms for targeting and programmatic placement of the right spots to the right viewers, based on what it knows about its audience’s behavior and proclivities. Sponsors need to weigh that when deciding how to allocate their media dollars.

Valory says Plex’s edge comes from its data. “We’re very open about and transparent about sharing data with both our content partners and our advertising partners within privacy limits,” he said. “But we also have a different, more affluent set of users because they’re coming in to manage a number of their subscriptions and whatnot. We can identify them in aggregate [preserving privacy] and essentially create high-end profiles of what users are watching across every device, every country and every service.”

Because of its unique heritage, Plex has data that no one else has, relating to user behavior behind the firewall in consuming their owned video content. Valory says that many users opt in to sharing this data to improve recommendations and relevance. “We have an opportunity to help advertisers target those users on other platforms like TikTok or Facebook,” Valory said.

The company has also invested in its ad delivery capabilities. “We’re making sure we’ve optimized our ability to stay in the programmatic market, to the point that our programmatic auctions are vastly outperforming our direct sales,” said Todd Hay, VP of Revenue and Engagement for Plex. “The next step was to enrich what that inventory looks like. Advertisers like having that visibility for brand safety.”

Hay says the company uses its detailed data about viewer behavior to help micro-target in-stream trailers, native advertising, sponsored hubs, and opportunities to insert content into a viewer’s watch list with a one-click popup. He says this helps brands target consumers by their affinities: for example, correlating cruise ads to food programming because of the high correlation between those viewers and that product.

The frequency, duration and interruptive nature of these spots – even if they are highly targeted and relevant – has irritated some users, including many in the hardcore Plex fan community, who look askance at the company’s shift in focus away from their beloved media app and toward the streaming market. Many have asked for a premium ad-free paid tier, but that is precluded by FAST content distribution and licensing agreements, according to the company.

Valory acknowledges the concerns of the community. “We love our superfans and their needs are very important,” he said. “I think many of them understand that, realistically, for us to grow and thrive, we can’t just be a personal media server running at home. But at the same time, the largest development team in the company still services the personal media product even though it is not the largest revenue business, and we’re only able to do that because of all the other things we’re doing.

“People will say oh, that’s just the CEO giving a political answer, but I assure you, we talk about this all the time internally, and some of the biggest superfans and loudest users of the product are the people who work here.”

Valory said that Plex, which currently does not disclose financial information, generates roughly 20 percent of its revenues from member subscriptions, which unlock premium capabilities of its media platform, compared to 80 percent from the ad business.

Moving forward, Valory says the company sees opportunities in bundling paid subscription models, using Plex’s detailed knowledge of user tastes and behavior. “Some services are paying insane amounts on user acquisition,” said Valery. “I think our better opportunity is to help other subscriptions bundle and create discounts for end users. We don’t need to take a dime of that; we will make our money on advertising and helping people get the content they want.”

The shakeout of premium SVOD services is just getting underway, and the FAST/AVOD market, with its range of players and distinct value propositions, makes it a difficult environment for advertisers, investors and consumers to place their bets. But whatever the future of streaming holds, Plex is betting that the best strategy is to build out from the center

.

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