Independent Games Festival

The tradition & historical record

The Independent Games Festival (IGF) is an annual festival at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the largest annual gathering of independent developers in the industry. Originally founded in 1998 to promote independent video game developers, and innovation in video game development by CMP Media, later known as UBM Technology Group, IGF is now owned by Informa after UBM's acquisition. The IGF competition awards a total of approximately $28,000 in prizes to independent developers in Main Competition and Student Competition categories and is held around the same time as the Game Developers Choice Awards event. ¹

As of 2026, there are ten award categories: ¹

Seumas McNally Grand Prize ($10,000) Excellence In Visual Art ($2,000) Excellence In Audio ($2,000) Excellence in Design ($2,000) Excellence in Narrative ($2,000) Nuovo Award ($2,000) Best Student Game ($2,000) Audience Award ($2,000) WINGS Awards ($2,000) Prior to the Festival, developers have the opportunity to submit their game in a playable state to the IGF organization committee for a small fee. These titles are then sent to approximately 250-300 game industry representatives on the Nominating Committee; these representatives include both indie developers and more mainstream developers and publishers. Each Committee member can nominate any of the provided games to one or more of the categories. Then, for each award category, a pre-selected jury of between seven and ten members reviews the nominations and makes a final selection of six finalists (eight for the Nuovo award) and a number of honorable mentions. The selected finalists are expected to present their games at the IGF during the Games Developers Conference; the show provides them a booth space and access to the convention, but finalists either must secure their own travel and lodgings, or name a proxy to demonstrate their games. During the convention, a separate jury selected by the IGF organization committee will review each game, and just prior to the awards, vote for one game in each category. The only exception is the Audience Award, which is voted through online forms by anyone interested. ¹

Years given below indicate the year when the award was given, with the games or developers being recognized from the previous year. In 2004 and 2005 the awards were split into two separate categories - Open Category (OC) and Web/Downloadable (WD). ¹

Awarding innovative games: ¹

The category was previously named Best Game Design (1999-2000), Innovation in Game Design (2001-2006), and Design Innovation (2007-2008). ¹

The Best Student Game award was first given out at the 2007 IGF Awards. Prior to that, from 2004-2006, the IGF Student Showcase highlighted ten student-designed games but did not give out an award. ¹

Student Showcase 2004-2006: ¹

2006: Ballistic • Cloud • Colormental • Narbacular Drop • Ocular Ink • Orblitz • Palette • Sea of Chaos • Goliath • NERO 2005: Dyadin • Intergalactic Shopping Maniacs • Mutton Mayhem • Rock Station • Scavenger Hunt • Soccer Ref • Squirrel Squabble • Stars and Stripes • Team Robot • War, Siege & Conquest: Battle for Gaia 2004: Dark Archon 2 • Fatal Traction • Growbot • Hexvex • Hyperbol • Ice Wars • Kube Kombat • Scrapped • Treefort Wars • Xazzon ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Independent Games Festival”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Independent Games Festival is annual video games festival, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 6 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²