I was lucky enough to visit Tokyo, Japan, earlier this June to attend the first-ever SkyFest – a massive fan celebration and five-year anniversary party for Sky: Children of the Light. Over 300k fans visited the Shinjuku Sumitomo Building either as ticketed attendees or passers-by to join in the activities and listen to the developers from thatgamecompany talk over the course of the weekend.
If you’re not familiar with Sky, it’s a “social MMO” that’s a spiritual successor to Journey, arguably thatgamecompany’s most well-known game. Over the past five years, Sky has grown exponentially, garnering a massive fanbase and community across mobile, console, and most recently, PC. Unlike some other MMOs and mobile-first games, Sky’s fanbase spans all ages and genders, focuses on emotional storytelling without dialog, and is one of the least toxic communities I have ever experienced both in-game and in real life.
After being in a convention center with those fans and seeing their reactions to the physical recreation of Aviary Village, the game’s homeworld, and the joy on their faces during CEO Jenova Chen’s keynote speech, it became incredibly clear to me that Sky’s community is one of a kind. To dive further into ideas of creativity and community in Sky, I sat down with the game’s Art Director Cecil Kim, and Community Manager Denise Schlickbernd to chat about all things SkyFest.
Firstly, what’s your favorite thing about SkyFest 2024?
Denise Schlickbernd: “This is gonna sound like such a ‘community’ thing to say, but it’s the players. There’s something about seeing all of these people who love the same thing that you do and like all of the work we put in, whether it’s the art, or the design, or on a community end of things, just seeing everybody come and be excited for the same thing… that the work you’re doing does have an impact.
Just the energy, or to use a Japanese word, the ‘genki’ everybody brings. It’s humbling and encouraging and invigorating all at once to see fans come out and share what the game has meant to them, whether with us or with other fans. It’s really cool to see.
On a lighter note, the krill cut-out! I love that so much. I get to face the krill but in real life, I don’t die – what’s not to love?”
Cecil Kim: “We’ve been engaging face-to-face with fans at the game conventions, but this is a different scale. This time, we’re not part of Gamescom or GDC. This is our own thing, and we’re actually seeing our fans face-to-face closely. I was doing a book signing for hours yesterday…”
I saw – the queue was huge!
CK: “You kind of start to understand after you sign hundreds of fans books who the fans actually are. So I think that’s priceless. Plus, their excitement is really something special.”
From what I’ve seen this weekend, Sky is definitely the type of game to inspire endless fan art, cosplays, and Sky-sonas. How do you work with the community to inspire and improve on existing character designs, clothing, etc.?
DS: “Different pockets within the community will have a different sense of what they want [from cosmetics] based on their culture, their age, where they’re from, but also the Skysonas that they have for themselves or these characters that they make and write stories about and make art about. So sometimes they want goth and dark and edgy, which personally I think would be kind of cool, but also we’re not necessarily a “goth game”.
So the question is, ‘within the realm of what Sky is and what it is evolving to be, how can we merge these ideas that we cannot copy and paste into Sky’s world?’ We still want that essence of what a player is asking for without breaking the rules of Sky.”
How does the Sky Assembly program – Sky’s existing fan meet-up system – look now that you’ve pulled off SkyFest? Can we expect more large-scale events in the future?
DS: “There’s something to be said for an event the scale of this one where you can walk through Aviary, you can hug a krill if you wanted to. You feel like you’re immersed in the world. You’re in this festival mode with a bunch of people, and you feel that connection even if you can’t talk with every individual person. But I think because of the kind of game that Sky is, and I sometimes think with our studio too, we’re the kind of people who want to connect with others, but maybe we tend to be more introverted.
When you want to talk and have meaningful interactions with people, you can’t do that with thousands of people in one day. Having something whether it’s a smaller event, like how assembly started out, or something large-ish like this will just depend on questions like, ‘What’s the occasion? What’s the location? What’s the budget looking like? What do players want? But I think we’re definitely having fun with it. And we would like to do it again, for sure.”
CK: “Some of the fans actually came from other countries, and also different parts of Japan, so even though [putting on our own event] is a lot of work, we’re inspired to do more. It pushes us to look forward to the events like this too, and prepare good presentations and stuff.”
We also chatted to Schlickbernd and Kim about the future of Sky’s broadcasting technology following the success of last year’s Aurora concert, which you can read more about here. Kim referenced how thatgamecompany sees Sky as a “theme park”, an idea that Jenova Chen frequently references in interviews and talks.

Following on from the success of the Aurora concert, how do live music events factor into Sky’s future?
CK: “In Pasadena California, there’s the Rose Bowl. They do concerts there but they also have football. They have everything. So I think that [our broadcasting tools] are going to be used for not just music concerts but other performances, because Sky is essentially a theme park.”
DS: “The designers and the engineers have all kinds of ideas all the time – I think the only thing that are slowing them down are the laws of physics and time. So I can’t talk to any specifics about what future plans are, but the [live concert in-game for SkyFest] is like a version 1.0 of some of the ideas we have and that we’re hoping to do in the future.”
Sky: Children of the Light truly has one of the most welcoming and sweet communities I have ever witnessed in gaming. I played a little of the game before my trip to Tokyo, but meeting the people behind the game and their dedicated community has fully convinced me to spend more time amongst the Sky kids. If you’re looking for a game that has the power to enact positive change in gaming and in the wider world, I think you’ll find it with Sky.
To learn more about this wholesome game, check out our stories on the Sky: Children of the Light Moomin collaboration and Sky: Children of the Light’s Days of Nature campaign to save the oceans. We’ve also got some wonderful lists of cute games and free Switch games that you can explore.