New awards for small teams and meaningful games at DevGAMM
One of the things we love most about running the DevGAMM Awards competition is collecting feedback from over 500 participating dev teams and 150 experts serving as judges. After the ceremony is over, we talk through all opinions and look for ways to make the competition better.
Last year, the popular thought was: there were great games that didn’t quite fit the existing categories – or simply got overshadowed by larger productions. So we made a few changes.
Here are the new categories at the 2026 DevGAMM Awards.
01.🏆 Best Small Team Game
Our competition is open to games created by teams of up to 50 people. But let’s be honest – there’s a huge difference between a game made by one or two developers and one built by a team of twenty.
That’s why we’re introducing Best Small Team Game.
This category is dedicated to truly small independent teams of up to 10 people, without external publisher or investor support.
Our hope is simple – to encourage smaller teams to submit their games and to give more visibility to their incredible projects that might otherwise go unnoticed.
02.🚀 Best Game in Early Development
We also heard feedback that early-stage games often struggle to compete with polished releases. That’s why we’re launching Best Game in Early Development, a category exclusively for demos and vertical slices.
One might not realize how many publishers and investors are part of our judging panel. But it’s true – and every year they’re actively looking for promising unreleased games.
Sometimes it leads to real opportunities. Exhibit A: special category sponsor, tinyBuild, discovered Hozy while judging the DevGAMM Awards, and signed the publishing deal with the team.
We’d love to see more stories like that.
This year’s judging panel includes investors, PC and mobile publishers from Curve Games, FDG Entertainment, Focus Entertainment, The Games Fund, Anshar Publishing, Akupara Games, Kepler Interactive, TapNation, SayGames, and more.
That said, submitting a game isn’t just about winning – it can also be a chance to get a project in front of those decision-makers actively looking for new games to publish.
03.❤️ Meaningful Game
But the most common feedback from last year’s judges led to the introduction of this new category.
With the help of our partners, we’ve added a Meaningful Game category – celebrating games that create emotional, cultural, educational, social, political, or personal impact through play.
As the Meaningful Play community puts it:
“Making a very good game is already setting yourself up for a challenge, and making a good meaningful game is double the challenge.”
Developers creating such projects often face an extra hurdle. There are very few awards dedicated to this kind of work, and even fewer funding opportunities that recognize games for the impact they create.
We hope this category helps shine a spotlight on the talented developers creating experiences that truly matter.
04.⭐ DevGAMM Choice
Finally… this one comes directly from the DevGAMM team.
Over the past two years, several games of impeccable quality narrowly missed becoming finalists. They were excellent games – they just happened to compete in exceptionally strong categories.
It honestly felt unfair.
So we’re introducing DevGAMM Choice.
The internal team of the competition will select five outstanding games that missed finalist status. Those five titles will receive one more chance, and the judges will decide the final winner.
The hope is for this category to recognize a few more amazing games the way they deserve.
The competition is tense. And the hope behind these new categories is that they will showcase a wider variety of games and create more opportunities for the teams.
There is no better time to apply, as the experts are already eager to start testing the new talented creations. The submissions for the DevGAMM Awards 2026 are open till September 7.
