Hot on the heels of their inaugural developers’ contest YoYo Games has announced its next major community competition:
The challenge is to create a "casual" game at least loosely employing "ancient civilization" as a central theme. The winning titles stand to win $1,750 between them and, naturally, community kudos. The developers have been given until the 27th of April, 2008, to submit their projects.
“We’re very excited about the next competition" said Sandy Duncan, CEO, YoYo Games, "The originality and depth of gameplay achieved by the developers for the winter competition games demonstrates the power of GML as a language for online casual gaming, and suggests our community formula is already starting to pay off. We see this next competition as an opportunity for the community to flex their programming muscles”
At the beginning of January YoYo announced their 10,000th game, that figure has now climbed to over 12,000, a significant community achievement by any standard. Moreover, as well as a large and rapidly growing games library, YoYo have the world’s largest developer community with 75,000 registered indie developers from all over the world, ranging in age from 8 to 80. What they all have in common is a passion for the “Game Maker” software, owned by YoYo games and developed originally by YoYo co-founder Professor Mark Overmars.
YoYo Games is providing young independent developers with the necessary tools and platform to create the games they want to play, and perhaps more importantly with an audience to play them.
This service can be provided free of charge because the relationship between YoYo and its developers is symbiotic. The developers gain much needed publicity and the site benefits from a wealth of user-generated content which differentiates it from other casual gaming sites out there. Such a model is bound to encourage innovation without the traditional constraints of an “owned” title. The bumper crop of winter competition games supports this idea.
About YoYoGames.com
YoYo Games Ltd is a UK Based Game Start up founded by Game industry veterans, Sandy Duncan and Michel Cassius. YoYo Games launched its beta site in May 2007 and has grown to be the world’s largest user generated game site. Employing a web 2.0 community model YoYo Games allows users to “Play, Make and Share games” for free.
You can visit YYG at www.YoYoGames.com