The 2020 Freeplay Awards are now open for submissions.
However, we’ve made the difficult decision to host this year’s Awards Ceremony online.
The safety, comfort, and well-being of our community is incredibly important to us. We’re currently looking into how this emergency will impact the rest of the festival. We remain committed to making Freeplay happen this year and we’re investigating alternative formats for all our events. We’ll have more on this soon.
We’re looking forward to all the fantastic games that have been released in ANZ over the last year, and will keep you updated as we have more information on Freeplay 2020!
Freeplay 2019 Awards, photo by David Ma.
The Freeplay Awards have been a long-standing cornerstone of the festival and the Australian independent games community, celebrating new and emerging voices, creative talent, and bold experimental ideas.
We’ve carried over our categories from last year. The 2020 Freeplay Award categories are as follows:
- The Freeplay Award (Best Game)
- Excellence in Design
- Excellence in Visual Art
- Excellence in Audio
- Excellence in Narrative
- Non-Digital Game Award
- Micro-Game Award
- Experimental Game Award
- Student Game Award
- Across The Ditch Award
We’re delighted to bring back the Across The Ditch Award, a category initiated by and shared with Play By Play, our sister games festival in New Zealand. This is a special category that our Kiwi developer friends can submit to. We’re also bringing back the Micro-Game Award, Experimental Game Award, and Student Game Award categories. These categories help us frame the types of games we want to see made and celebrated in our communities.
A brief description of the categories can be found on the submission form.
Submissions will close on Sunday 26th April at 11:59pm (AEST), and finalists will be announced five weeks after the submission closing date.
The Awards ceremony will take place online on the final day of the festival. Please read the submission guidelines before filling in the form, and submit your games when ready!
Finally, we’ll be announcing more Freeplay 2020 news soon, including international speakers, talk submissions, and volunteer opportunities. In the meantime, if you would like to get involved in any way, if you have any ideas, or if there’s anything you would like to see or hear at Freeplay, please get in touch!