WHO ARE THE FREAKS?
We're a group of game developers based in Australia. We aren't a company, we don't have roles or titles and the group changes all the time. It's completely unsustainable and couldn't possibly last long. It's literally insane that we're doing this.
IT’S FREE
We started FREAKON because we reckon there should be an alternative space for honest discussion and knowledge sharing about game dev with no financial barrier to entry.
The Freaks have been making games for a while, and we’ve learned the value of the kind of knowledge that gets filtered out of large scale Industry Events. The first FREAKON brought that kind of knowledge out of group chats and into a space anyone was welcome (for free). We loved doing it for the last three years and so we’re doing it again in 2026.
IT’S FOR YOUR SOUL
This is one of the most cooked times to be a game developer in recent memory, when so many of us are at the mercy of executive decision making that is misinformed, gutless and embarrassing.
FREAKON is a place where you can talk about it. Whatever it is for you.
NO CORPORATE SPONSORS
We believe that corporate sponsorship always comes with some form of expectation, directly or indirectly, which erodes our freedom to host questionable and ill advised content on the FREAKON stage. We don’t and won’t ever take corporate money.
We are a community run volunteer event. Running this as a lean, cheap, grassroots setup that doesn’t have the baggage of boards and committees is part of what makes FREAKON possible. You can support us directly by buying a sick shirt or donating money. If we have any extra funds from donations they’ll go to a worthy cause, not our pockets.
None of the Freaks make a dollar from FREAKON. Most of us end up losing money buying our own merch, which is pretty funny. Why are we doing this.
NO RECORDINGS
FREAKON is not recorded, streamed, live-tweeted, or fed into an LLM. Speakers are encouraged to speak from their guts. Nobody has ever leaked any slides or quotes from FREAKON. It exists between the people in the room and lives on in the wrinkles of our brains forever. There are many events and platforms where you can find recorded game development knowledge. This is something else.
We understand this means not everyone will get to hear what FREAKON speakers have to say, and that’s okay. Our hope is that the spirit of FREAKON extends beyond just what’s said within its walls, and that it reaches you wherever you are via a new astral projection method we're testing out.
NO WORRIES
We’re running FREAKON purely because we love putting it on for the people. That's it. It's free.
Hit us up at freaks@freakon.com.au if you have an idea for a talk at FREAKON, are running your own community event, or have questions about what we’re doing. As we are volunteers we make no promises about speed of reply. xoxo