Gearing up for the 2025 IFDB Awards

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)

==Not enough games==
3 fi.js (french system)
3 gruescript
2 quest
2 adrift

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.

Link

(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).

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The link seems to be broken, fyi! I’ve noticed IFDB search links have a tendency to break when shared; not sure what can be done about that…

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There are 13 Narrat games if you search for published:2025 system:narrat

Mathbrush’s original search query was: published:2025 -system:twine -system:dialog -system:inform 7 -system:ren'py -system:ink -system:videotome -system:inform 6 -system:choicescript -system:decker -system:bitsy -system:custom -system:unity -system:chooseyourstory -system:adventuron -system:godot -system:tads -system:dendry

Excluding Narrat as well it would be: published:2025 -system:twine -system:dialog -system:inform 7 -system:ren'py -system:ink -system:videotome -system:inform 6 -system:choicescript -system:decker -system:bitsy -system:custom -system:unity -system:chooseyourstory -system:adventuron -system:godot -system:tads -system:dendry -system:narrat

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Thanks, I think I got the link working now! This does happen every year :frowning: 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!

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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.

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I’ve updated the current list to incorporate all feedback so far. Thanks!

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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…)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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