Voting for the IFDB Awards for games published in 2025 is coming up soon, in the first week of February! I plan on starting right on February 1st.
The IFDB Awards is a series of anonymous IFDB polls for the best games on IFDB in many distinct categories, including craftmanship (like good writing or puzzles), genres, languages, and systems.
Each category needs at least 5 candidates before votes can be held.
So far, searching for games from last year on IFDB, I’m seeing:
292 Twine games
68 Inform 7 games
61 Ren’py games
54 Ink games
36 Choicescript games
25 Custom games
23 Inform 6 games (including 19 punyinform)
21 Decker games
19 Godot games
15 Unity games
9 Dialog games (wow! that’s more than 1/3 of all Dialog games ever)
8 Adventuron games
8 Videotome games
7 Bitsy games
7 TADS games
5 Dendry/dendrynexus games (should these be lumped together? There are 4 dendrynexus and 1 dendry)
That leaves around 80 games made with rare systems (< 5 games), of which 30 have upvotes. It’s possible there is some system that has 5 games in the 50 that don’t have ratings or reviews, but I’m not including them in the IFDB awards if no one has rated them all year.
(A couple of systems with several games but not enough ratings have been omitted).
If you know of a game that was published in 2025 but doesn’t show up when you search published:2025 I encourage you to update it so it is eligible for the awards!
(edit: I also see 10 Spanish, 22 French, and 7 German games).
Thanks, I think I got the link working now! This does happen every year I should really learn at some point
Narrat falls into the category of not having any IFDB votes for any of its games, so I wouldn’t feel confident that people would vote in that category. However, if 5 of its games have votes before we start the competition, or if at least 1 game has several votes, I’d be happy to add it!
I’m not sure how to say this tactfully, but given that the CYS community has a long history of violating TOS to try to manipulate stats on IFDB specifically, is it a good idea to do anything that’s going to encourage them to come to IFDB and get up to their usual nonsense? I mean, I’m sure you’d spot and deal with any irregularities, but it kind of feels like making more work for yourself.
I noted in the list my return to home, which is a little more than an exercise in coding, but looking at the format of 2024 results, I guess that there’s no need to formally retire it…
Anyway, I’m curious (bookmarked mathbrush’s search list) albeit I don’t think that I can have time for voting (Naval issues have priority…)
The polls will be going up on Sunday for this year’s IFDB awards. Are there any categories that need to be added to the above list?
Also, I haven’t checked yet, but we also do genre categories based on the drop-down menu of categories. Only genres with at least 5 games and several votes from different people on those games will be included. For instance, there is only one 2025 game with the ‘travel’ genre, so it will not be included. Similarly, ‘abuses’, ‘adaptations’, ‘childrens’, ‘educational’, ‘seasonal’, ‘collegiate’, ‘religious’ and ‘western’ will not be added. ‘Espionage’ only has 3 games, but they have a lot of votes. If two more games get tagged ‘espionage’ I’ll include the category.
The categories that will make it in are:
Fantasy, Historical, Horror, Humor, Mystery, Romance, Science Fiction, Slice of Life, Superhero (just barely!), and Surreal.
If you want your game included in the genre categories, make sure you add them so they appear in searches! People can vote for games not listed with the specified genre, but it does make it easier to find your game during the awards.
The awards will slowly come up later today. I’d expect the first in about 4 hours from now and to be done in about 8 hrs (I’m writing this at 13:54 GMT/7:54 central time).
I’m realizing I don’t actually know—how do cross-genre works interact with this? For example, Wise-Woman’s Dog is tagged both historical and fantasy, though I’d say it’s more historical than fantasy.
Since last year’s rule change, voters can nominate games for any genre category they feel like. Only the system and language nominations require the games to have that system and that language. So technically Wise-Woman’s Dog could win Best Historical, Best Fantasy and Best Espionage if that’s what voters wanted.
I believe games can be voted on in any genre poll, so if people want to vote it for either “best fantasy game” or “best historical game” they can, and indeed there’s nothing stopping someone for voting it in “best romance game” except that it’s probably a waste of a vote unless you have reason to expect others to vote the same way.
I should really learn at some point