During the Summer Google held their first Indie Games Festival which had Android indie game developers submitting their games in an attempt to win a variety of prizes, all of which revolve around getting their games out in front of many more eyes. This would inevitably end up boosting download of course. Unfortunately for a lot of developers, this was strictly for developers in the North America. This left out a lot of developers located outside of North America.
Well Google has launched the European version of the same event, but with a slightly different name. Now it is called the Android Indie Game Contest, which actually fits a lot better as a name than the previous Indie Game Festival. This particular content are for studios and development teams that are made up of 15 people or less. If you have more than 15, you will not qualify. You also have to be located in Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the UK (excluding Northern Ireland). Again, if you are not located in one of those countries, you do not qualify. France and Poland will be added shorty. The other requirements to enter this contest are similar to the North American one.
You must either have had your game published onto Google Play after January 1st, 2016, or you must current be working on a game that will be published onto Google Play in the very near future. The latter option requires you to send a build privately to Google. All submissions must be in by December 31st, 2016. Finalists will be selected and announced in mid-January 2017, of which there will be up to 20 finalists picked at that time. All of the finalists that are selected will have their title shown off at an event Google will be hosting on February 16th, 2017 at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Finalists will have their game promoted on a billboard in London for one month. All finalists will also receive two tickets to a 2017 Playtime event along with one Google Pixel XL phone and a DayDream View device.
Out of the original 20 finalists, the top 10 finalists will receive extra promotion for their submitted game within the Google Play Store. The top 3 finalists will net themselves €50,000 worth of YouTube promotions. The team that lands the top spot, however, will receive an additional €50,000 worth of YouTube promotion (€100,000 total), featured in the Android Developer Story video produced by Google Play, promoted on the Android Developer and Play Developer channels, and two tickets to attend the upcoming GDC 2017 in San Francisco in March 2017. There’s also additional prizes for finalists such as tickets to Google I/O 2017, special prizes for the best Unity3D built game, credits for the Google Cloud platform, and more. You can view the entire prize list here.
Not a bad bundle of prizes but you do, of course, have to get your game into Google by the end of this year. So best of luck to everyone entering and we will see the top finalist in San Francisco next year. We will post updates as finalists are announced.
Official Website: Google Android Indie Game Contest
