Kongregate, Unity Help Out IGF 2008
For those keeping up with the 2008 Independent Games Festival, to be held at GDC next February in San Francisco, and which we help run, there's some good news for those wanting to enter web-based games and not wanting to, uh, pay. Here's the skinny from Matthew Wegner:
"Firstly, Flash game site Kongregate is running a competition where its 10 highest rated games of the year, as of September 15th 2007, will be entered into the IGF "Best Web Game" category free of charge."
"Secondly, OTEE is running a game development competition for developers using Unity, their 3D game development tool. The contest is for online games played in a web browser using the Unity Web Player. In addition to a cash award and other prizes, the five contest finalists will each be entered into the IGF's “Best Web Game” category free of charge."
Both of these announcements should help those competing for Best Web Game who release their game for free, and may have therefore balked at the $95 entry fee. (Previous winners of the category include Dad 'N Me and the pictured Samorost 2.) Matthew also reminds that the deadlines for the competition [EDIT: Produced by CMP, as is GameSetWatch, just so we're clear!] is "...October 1st for the main competition and October 15th for the student competition (just 56 and 70 days to go, respectively)."
Comments
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(jumps up & down for emphasis)
Posted by: gnome | August 8, 2007 7:46 AM
so can i enter a game maker game yet?
Posted by: dessgeega | August 8, 2007 7:56 AM
Dess, mail chairman at igf dot com to discuss this. You wouldn't be able to because... you can't release commercial Game Maker games? We'd certainly like them entered (or I would!)
Posted by: simonc | August 8, 2007 9:10 AM
this sounds a bit too much like "spam the IGF for promotional purposes"..
Posted by: raigan | August 8, 2007 11:57 AM
Sure, Raigan, this is a CMP blog and I'm Chairman of the IGF, I don't have any qualms about mentioning the IGF in it.
Posted by: simonc | August 8, 2007 12:18 PM
Anything to encourage independent game development is good by me! But I do worry what stipulations these contests have (IE: if a contestant wins, do they still get the prize?)
Posted by: jszepietowski | August 9, 2007 1:34 PM
Josh, this will be spelled out further by Kongregate and Unity, but all that's happened is that the companies have agreed to pay the entry fees - they won't share in any of the prizing.
Posted by: simonc | August 9, 2007 1:39 PM
I think you misunderstood -- I meant that Kongregate/Unity are spamming the IGF with entries!
Posted by: raigan | August 10, 2007 5:42 PM
Well, we asked them to do it in order to increase the quality of the web games, and the games themselves aren't created by those companies.
They're just hosted on their site (in the case of Kongregate) and created by the Unity engine (in the case of Unity.)
Still seems like a useful way to get more web games (often an under-entered category!) up there. Worth noting that most games on Kongregate are not exclusive to Kongregate, so it's not 'only X brand games can enter'.
Posted by: simonc | August 11, 2007 7:50 AM