DevGAMM Awards 2026 Nominees: Full List, Ceremony Date and Prize Details

The DevGAMM Awards 2026 nominee list is here, putting 70 games from 25 countries in contention across its third annual ceremony. The field was selected from 1,088 submissions sent in by 987 teams across 80 countries, a record pool that makes the final slate notably selective.

Small developers are a central part of the picture: more than half of the nominated games were made by teams of five people or fewer. That matters because the awards are not limiting recognition to a single “indie” bracket. Small teams appear throughout the overall categories, including design, art, narrative, audio, early development, and the Grand Prize.

Winners are due to be announced in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 18 at 10 a.m. PT, 1 p.m. ET, and 6 p.m. GMT. The ceremony is set to include game announcements and updates alongside the awards. Its prize pool includes $100,000 in cash prizes supported by Scorewarrior, plus more than $40,000 in sponsored category prizes from Epic Games Store, Unreal Engine, tinyBuild, Unity, and Godot.

That scale of support is meaningful for the nominated studios, particularly the smallest operations. Awards are not a substitute for a game’s eventual commercial performance, but a nomination can put an unreleased or early-stage project in front of players, publishers, platform holders, and other developers. In a year where the wider business side of games has continued to face pressure, including reported team reductions at major companies, visibility for independent work has real practical value. The changing size of game-development teams remains an important industry issue, making a program that explicitly recognizes small teams especially timely.

Grand Prize nominees

The overall award has five contenders, spanning a mix of projects that also recur in the specialist categories.

Dead As Disco — Brain Jar Games
Echoes of Mystralia — Borealys Games
Mortal Shell II — Cold Symmetry
MOUSE: P.I. For Hire — Fumi Games
Phonopolis — Amanita Design

MOUSE: P.I. For Hire and Phonopolis are also nominated for Excellence in Visual Art, while Phonopolis additionally appears in Excellence in Audio. Dead As Disco has one of the broadest presences, with nominations for Grand Prize, audio, the Epic Games Store Indie Spotlight, and Best Unreal Engine Game. Mortal Shell II likewise turns up in the Unreal Engine category.

Those repeat appearances should not be read as a prediction of winners. They do, however, show where the nominee slate overlaps: some games have made an impression across more than one discipline rather than being recognized in only a single lane.

Craft awards: design, art, narrative and audio

The awards separate several major development disciplines. Game design generally concerns how a game’s rules, systems, structure, and player choices work together. Visual art covers a game’s visual presentation. Narrative concerns storytelling, while audio encompasses the sound work that helps define how a game is heard and felt. The nominees are:

Excellence in Game Design

Desktop Explorer — Recurring Dream
Froggy Hates Snow — Crying Brick
IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator — Nick Nieuwoudt and Dominik Latos
Rewindead — Spellwork AB
Timberborn — Mechanistry

Excellence in Visual Art

Micromega — COVEN
Midgardr — Holy Radish
MOUSE: P.I. For Hire — Fumi Games
Phonopolis — Amanita Design
UNBEATABLE — D-CELL GAMES

Excellence in Narrative

Call of the Elder Gods — Out of the Blue Games
Desktop Explorer — Recurring Dream
Ledgerbound — OmniMegaSuperCorp
Pieced Together — Glowfrog Games
Schrödinger's Call — Acrobatic Chirimenjako

Excellence in Audio

Band Wagon — Bippinbits
Dead As Disco — Brain Jar Games
Phonopolis — Amanita Design
Ratatan — Ratata Arts Inc.
UNBEATABLE — D-CELL GAMES

Desktop Explorer is nominated in both design and narrative, while UNBEATABLE has visual-art and audio recognition. These cross-category nominations help make the program more useful as a discovery list: players interested in a specific craft can find candidates in one category, then identify projects being noticed in several others.

Mobile, upcoming, early-development and small-team nominations

The nominees also divide games by development stage or platform. “Most Anticipated” and “Best Game in Early Development” are distinct: the former identifies upcoming games generating interest, while the latter focuses specifically on work at an early point in its production. The awards do not provide release dates or platform details for these nominees, so the categories should not be treated as release schedules.

Best Mobile Game

Gambonanza — Blukulele (Paul Giovannini)
Pirates Outlaws 2: Heritage — Fabled Game Limited
Scritchy Scratchy — Lunch Money Games
Servant of the Lake — Rusty Lake
Twin Shot Deluxe — Nitrome Limited

Most Anticipated Game

Cards & Cannons — Flamehead Games UG
Crop — Carbonara Games
Koshmar: The Last Reverie — Purple Ray Studio
PinKeep — Okomotive
Steel Soul Shaper — GENEPOP

Best Game in Early Development

BANDIT KNIGHT — Game Float
Bolt & Whalington — Orca Studio
Burdenfall — Leftovers Games
Code RAPID — Hitbreak Games LLC
Hold Your Dragons — Igor Krutov

Best Small Team Game

Compress(space) — B-Deshi Interactive
Dobbel Dungeon — Gamepie
MOLDRISE — Raffaele Picca
Omelet You Cook — Bird Gang Games
Worming from Home — Zach Northrop and Mason Sabharwal

The Best Small Team Game category sits alongside the broader statistic that a majority of all nominees were developed by five or fewer people. It offers a focused spotlight, but the larger takeaway is that compact teams are competitive across the complete awards slate rather than confined to one category.

Meaningful Game, Portuguese nominees and DevGAMM Choice

Three further categories emphasize different kinds of recognition: games with a meaningful focus, work from the host country, and the DevGAMM Choice selection.

Meaningful Game

1998: The Toll Keeper Story — GameChanger Studio
Amnios — HES-SO (HEAD-Genève + HEdS)
As Long As You're Here — Autoscopia
Fishbowl — imissmyfriends.studio
Grow Wild — SPECTRUM48

Best Game from Portugal

ALL LIGHT IS GONE — Octupus Embrace
Hanno: A Magical Tale — One Way Eleven
NECROMENTAL — Digitality Games
Shelf Heroes — Fun Punch Games
War Doctor — Red Pine Studios

DevGAMM Choice

Demon Bluff — UmiArt
HOMURA HIME — Crimson Dusk
inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories — Nagai Industries
Monster Chef — Studio Pizza
Wax Heads — Patattie Games

DevGAMM Awards 2026 Names 70 Nominees, With Small Teams Prominent Across the Field

Grand Prize nominees