GDCA Finalists Announced

By: Derek Yu

On: February 12th, 2009

Here’s some exciting news: a number of independent games have been nominated for Game Developers Choice Awards this year, including Braid, World of Goo, Castle Crashers, and N+. Braid is nominated for a whopping 5 awards, second only to Little Big Planet (with 7). These awards are Best Game Design, Best Writing, Best Debut, Innovation, and Best Downloadable Game.

You can find the full list of nominees here.

Posted in Community, Competitions, IGF / GDC

http://www.dyson-game.com Alex May

indie 4 lyfe
Imp

Awesome, glad to see Braid, Castle Crashers and N+ on the list!

World of Goo also, it’s awesome.
http://www.adamatomic.com/ Adam Atomic

Braid was also nominated for the prestigious “Ain’t Never Run Outta Back In Time Potion” Award, but I haven’t seen it covered on the major outlets yet. KOTAKU EXCLUSIVE???
http://www.tscreative.net BMcC

Aw, I was just sitting down to post this.

Major congratulations to my indie brothas (and sistas)!
MikeK

Very happy to see Braid in there. And L4D! hells yeah! fingers crossed on that.

GTA4 was cool, but if it wins (i hope not) i hope everybodies cell phone goes off when they try to speak.
Mark

…it’s kinda lame that N+ only gets “Best Downloadable Game”, because it’s obvious Braid will win that.
BeamSplashX

N+ should also be nominated for the “Ain’t Never Run Outta Self-Destruct Bombs” award. A feature I used quite often.
Günter

I lost all respect for these awards when I saw that SPORE had been nominated the “Innovation Award”. :P

Seriously though, it’s nice to see so many Indie games getting recognition. I wonder if this is the most we’ve ever had in the GDCAs?
http://www.adamatomic.com/ Adam Atomic

Don’t forget, L4D is technically indie! They just didn’t bother submitting it to the IGF :)
PHeMoX

Oh come on, Left 4 Dead ain’t indie.
Sparky

Congratulations, everyone!

Valve (and Id) pretty respectable in my book, I’d rather just be content with whatever they are instead of fussing with labels.
http://www.funmahol.com Mobile

hey its great man!!!!!!!congratulations
TheSpaceMan

L4D and all Valve game are in a way “technicaly” Indie, due to the fact that they don’t have to listen to a publisher. There is no one telling them what to do except internally, and it’s the same thing with a small indie company as well. Valve just got the size.
PHeMoX

They may be autonomous, but they sure aren’t indie.

It would be a bit like saying EA’s internal studios are indie as well, because they only need to listen to themselves.

ID Software, 3DRealms and Valve are long past the definition of Indie.

Having said that, I hope Spore won’t win the ‘innovation’ award. It’s really not that innovative, it mainly just merged a big bunch of quite mediocre things into a bigger game. No offense to fans, but ever since I’ve played the game I couldn’t help but wonder about the insane reviews. Spore, even though somewhat enjoyable, really isn’t a very good game.
salade

world of goo deserves a nomination for best writing. even if it would knock out braid.

also my commercial side is screaming “fable 2 for best game of the year? booooooo”

who decides these awards? i’m serous, can ayone post a place where they list the commitee that decides these things?
mmm

Nominations for the likes of Spore or GTA IV are laughable. Did they pick the games based on biased reviews?
Hypersapien

I officially don’t want to hear another word about Braid unless it’s telling us the PC release date.
http://rmvx.gameclover.com RMVX

I’m getting tired of seeing the same indie games being nominated for awards everywhere and none of the others

There’s plenty of other indie games out there folks… show some love to them, not the guys who get so much marketing already they’re better known than most big titles!
Hypersapien

RMXV

Well then point us to some of them? Let people know about them, then they might get more popular and THEY might win awards.

Maybe the reason they aren’t getting nominated is because no one knows about them.
http://rmvx.gameclover.com RMVX

Have you taken a look at this site? Great indie games are all around you :-)
Hypersapien

I thought you meant ones that weren’t on tig.

Honestly, I’ve gone through a lot of the games on this site and in my opinion, the ones that are getting nominated really are better than the ones that aren’t.

Maybe you’ve looked at more games than I have, though.
Terminus Grover

“Did they pick the games based on biased reviews?”

*Bitch-slaps you repeatedly*

All reviews are, by definition, biased. They are the opinion of an individual, not a Wikipedia article. I can’t stand it when people use the phrase “biased reviews”.