There are many awards for video games, but most of them are just popularity contests, and therefore boring festivals. In my opinion, the ones that aren’t are the annual Independent Games Festival awards, the IGFs.
THE Steam Sale for the IGF Holidays provides plenty of examples of why, with discounts through July 20 on winners and finalists from throughout the history of the IGF Awards.
At the top of the Steam Sale page, you’ll find discounts on March’s 2024 IGF Award winners, including 10% off Rhythm Doctor, 70% off Mediterranea Inferno (pictured above), and 40% off Venba. Scroll down and you’ll find discounts on 2024 finalists (Cocoon! Cobalt Core! A Highland Song!) and past winners (80 Days! Spelunky! Fez! Darwinia! And many more).
The IGF awards are decided by a large group of journalists and developers who sift through a pile of hundreds of submitted games to make a case for a handful, and a smaller group of hand-picked judges, also mostly game developers, who select the list of nominees and, ultimately, the winners. It’s a decent system that has often succeeded in highlighting unknown games, like Outer Wilds, which won the Grand Prix in 2015 with an alpha version created by a team of students several years before its full commercial release. More generally, the IGF has succeeded, through the award categories and the discussions of the judges, in creating a culture that values design and innovation over popularity.
The result is the advancement of our media but also, hey, a huge list of great games, now at low prices.