Since the idle mention of possibly running an "awards program" sometime next year to promote indie talent is making the rounds, yeah I've been thinking about that for a while. Over the past 5 years of promoting indie talent, the most important thing to many of those games is exposure. The games market is flooded with titles and there's no sign of things slowing down.

Traditional games websites seem to be having less and less effect on the actual sales figures of games (with some exceptions such as Rockpapershotgun who do a fantastic job of writing really interesting pieces about games they found intriguing), whereas the potency of Youtube has got to such a point that Youtubers are prime targets for so-called "influencer" programs, paid promotion for titles because a spotlight on their platform is so valuable.

I've been tossing around ideas of how to create an indie awards show with both cash prizes and valuable promotion, using a network of Youtube gaming channels to do it. I like what the IGF does but I feel one of its weaknesses is that it doesn't really have the means to connect with the huge gamer audience that resides on Youtube and that's where gaming Youtube channels can excel. It's a very complimentary idea, whereas the IGF will judge with panels of experts and industry insiders, we can judge in a much more "everyman" fashion, which may be more appealing to a wider audience.

Youtubers and indie developers enjoy a benificial symbiotic relationship, Youtube might be the best thing to ever happen to indie developers and I'd love to run an event that celebrated that fact and handed out some fat stacks and promotion to some great games. So yeah, it's on the cards for 2015, very much in planning stages, may never happen, but I want to create it.