Competitions for Publishers

Design competitions are a good way to find games worth publishing. You can host your own, and you can talk to designers in any competition who have said they welcome it.

Hosting as your publisher

Hosting a competition needs a paid plan. Publisher mode on its own is not enough, since anyone can switch it on. Contacting designers works without a paid plan.

When you create a competition, choose your publisher profile under Host as. The competition then:

shows your publisher name as its host,
appears in a Design competitions section on your public publisher profile,
and appears on your publisher dashboard.

The dashboard's Design competitions card shows each competition's entries and community ratings, and how many evaluations are in while judging is underway. Use Browse entries to look through the games and Manage to run the competition.

Everything else works as described in Hosting a Competition.

Finding games

Every entry can be played from the competition page, so you can try any game that interests you. When you are browsing as a publisher, entries whose designers welcome contact carry an Open to publishers tag.

Contacting a designer

On the entry page of an opted-in entry, the Contact the designer section lets you write a message as your publisher. Sending it:

starts a conversation in your pitch inbox, attached to that entry's playable copy,
appears in the designer's My Pitches,
and emails the designer.

If you already have an open conversation about that entry, the section links to it with Open the conversation instead of starting another.

Only entries whose designer opted in can be contacted, and the designer can switch it off at any time. Sending a message does not give you any rights to the game or access to the designer's project.