The 10TH IMGA took place in 2014.
Here are all the games awarded that year.
Our 10th anniversary IMGA in 2014 saw an accelerated growth of free-to-play games. This has obviously had impact on the IMGA and will continue to do so in the future! Free-to-play games are incredibly difficult to judge, particularly if they are run as a service. They’re in constant evolution, and the developer can make changes constantly to improve the virality, monetization and retention of the game. With constantly evolving games, which version are we supposed to judge?
Of course, not all developers are happy to create free-to-play games, and prefer to make premium games at a cost to the player. With so many free games out there, it’s a dwindling market, so the publishers and developers are under pressure. They have to finance more marketing and make more effort to acquire audiences, and those who do use free-to-play need a team to constantly monitor their analytics and make updates accordingly. It’s a changing world for the production and publishing of mobile games.
The free-to-play craze has everybody talking about distribution raising user acquisition costs, how to increase the average revenue per player and reach life-time value milestones, but they’re not talking about what actually makes a game fun to play.
Making games is one of the most challenging jobs in the entertainment industry. It’s about images, sound, animations, interactions, and technology, and there are still so many games to make, so many experiments to embark on.
From a pessimistic point of view, the coming years could be dominated by more and more Clash of Clans and Candy Crush clones and less and less experimental games like Badland, Space Team, Contre Jour. We could see a lot of the fun, risk-taking innovations disappear from the platform completely, such as Papa Sangre, Device 6, Taiso. But our love for these innovative, exciting experiments in gaming keeps our hopes high.