Skip to main content

Google is launching an indie gaming festival in September

Prizes include I/O tickets and Tango devices

Google sign 3 (stock, 2040)

Google is hoping to lure more indie game developers to its platforms with an upcoming festival in San Francisco. Called simply the Indie Games Festival, the event takes place on September 24th, and Google is currently taking submissions for games that will be featured.

Submissions are open to developers in the US and Canada with a team of 15 people or less, and featured games must have been released sometime during 2016 — you’ll be able to submit games from now until August 14th. Google says it will announce the featured games later that month, and that it will be looking for “high-quality games that are both innovative and fun.” The event takes place less than a month before another big indie gaming festival, Indiecade in Los Angeles, which kicks off on October 14th.

Google Indie Games Festival

Since it will be open to the public as a free event, Google’s new event is a chance for small teams to introduce their games to a new audience. But Google will also be offering up some useful prizes, including Tango hardware, tickets for next year’s Google I/O, and ad space in the Google Play Store. The company also isn’t just looking for mobile games — Google is encouraging developers to submit titles for both Tango and its Cardboard virtual reality platform.

The new festival follows a handful of initiatives from Google aimed at courting indie developers, which are more prevalent on iOS since it’s often a more lucrative platform, despite being smaller in scale. This March, for instance, the company launched a new section of the Google Play Store called “Indie Corner” in order to highlight some of the best games on the platform.