IGF Student Competition Entries Announced

By: Derek Yu

On: November 19th, 2009

A record number (306) of entries to the Main Competition is, not surprisingly, followed by a record number of entries to the student competition. This year there were 193 games submitted by students to the IGF! I haven’t heard of many of the entries before, but they sound interesting – I’m seeing a lot of ideas and themes that are very rarely touched upon in gaming.

The IGF front page reminds us that previous student winners include Narbacular Drop (which became Portal), The Misadventures Of P.B. Winterbottom, The Blob, and Jenova Chen’s Cloud. Fine company to be with, indeed. Congratulations to all the student entrants!

Posted in Community, Competitions, Developers, IGF / GDC

http://www.arm42.com ARme

So a total of nearly 500 games to test, nice !
Good luck everyone ;)
HookerWithNoBeViS

Holy shit! These entries look delicious!!!
http://cymonsgames.com/ Cymon

Some of them are repeats, both student and main entries, so probably not as many as nearly 500.

They really need to do this biannually now.
TeamQuiggan

This is my first year submitting something to the IGF, I am excited! Good luck to the other Entrants!
http://www.leebleforest.wordpress.com Laura

Wow, that’s fantastic! Good luck to all the students who have entered, it looks like there are some great games out there ^_^
Dodger

499 different games entered (in total)!?!?! I don’t have enough time to play all of the games that I have already yet people keep churning out games (albeit, not all good – but an impressive amount none the less). How’s a gamer supposed to cope with this interactive entertainment overload??? That means next year there should be somewhere between 600 – 700 (combined projects). At this rate I’ll be dead before I actually finish another game, let alone start a couple of new ones!
Paul Eres

2-3 new games a day (if they’re all freeware) is doable, i think. most indie games aren’t that long anyway (for instance, dungeon being 10 minutes long) so you can easily fit 2-3 of them into a few hours.
fuzz

i would think an igf caliber entry would be longer than 10 minutes, though.
Paul Eres

you’d be surprised — try going through the list one time, there are a ton of shoddy ones. for instance, space spy is an igf contestant.
Dodger

You just made me think of something else though… even if every game was 10 mins long, that’s 499 x 10! Assuming they’re all free and they can all be finished (or have an ending of some sort). That’s over 83 hours of game play, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t very much, however, it does say something about the gaming “industry”. 499 people have a combined entertainment of over 83 hours. Cut that in half, you’ve got 250 with 40+ hours of entertainment. None of those people have been paid (that we know of) yet. And yet, here we have a “team” of developers making no money and releasing a plethora of free entertainment. What’s this mean? Something that we already know but need to keep reminding ourselves… Publishers are greedy! I’m talking the big guys, such as EA.

The big publishers should be ashamed of themselves (yah, that’s gonna happen) for creating such a bloated and expensive form of entertainment. I know development teams need to be paid money but wouldn’t it be great if more and more teams could handle their own publishing. I realize EA is like having a big stamp of “cool” on your game, but does that really warrant a $60 dollar price tag? I mean, aren’t they the ones that came up with this “suggested retail price” regarding the current state of the mainstream video game and the economy around THE biggest form of entertainment? Weren’t they the ones that increased the price of Console games by $10.00 because “High Def games cost more to make” and “you should feel privileged that we released this to you in high def”? Didn’t the Record companies do something like this, charging an unreasonable amount for records, tapes, and CD’s while paying the artists and musicians very little in comparison (which lasted quite a while) allowing the company CEO’s to become gluttonous, greedy, racketeering charlatans? Who needs a record label now though? The guys in Radio Head are still rich (and recently became more rich). I can’t help but feel that these Publishers are in the same greedy boat that those Record companies were in. It would be nice to see some of the mainstream and large development teams break away from the large publishing houses in that same way as well. It might only mean that gamers save $10 bucks on a $60 dollar game, but that’s something isn’t it?

Anyway, I’m way off topic and off course now… I’m dizzy just thinking about it now. I couldn’t help myself though. The subject just brought the idea into my head and I rolled with it. Sorry PPL!

If you haven’t guessed by now, I enjoy a good discussion.
Paul Eres

dodger — not to echo ‘fake paul eres’ (haha), but if you don’t like the way mainstream game companies run the industry, don’t buy their games, buy from indies instead; this year for instance i bought a total of 4 mainstream games (three were from atlus, which is a good medium sized company that makes games well worth their price), and over 20 indie games.
Dodger

I’ve purchased about 6 mainstream games this year, and easily over a dozen indie games. I do understand the point you’re making though. I always find it interesting how much free fun there is still out there (once you’ve paid for a computer that is). Also, if you’re patient (which I try to be) a lot of mainstream games (some that are very good) end up becoming bargain bin games which are much more affordable ($10 – $18 dollars for brand new games). By waiting for the price to drop significantly I’ve been able to obtain a rather large library of mainstream games as well.

BTW, one of those atlus games wouldn’t be Demon Souls would it (even though it was actually developed by From Software). It’s one of the few I don’t regret paying full price for, mostly because I pre-ordered it and was able to get the deluxe edition for $59.97 brand new because I also had a coupon that saved me $20 when ordering it. It’s a very good game (and tough as nails at some spots) but with the bonuses that were included I’m the price was reasonable to me.