Games of the West

Inspired by game jams like Ludum Dare where the participants pick the winners, each participant in this peer-curated festival both

1. Enters a game they hope to showcase in the festival and then
2. Plays and votes on a subset of games that others submitted

The joint votes are tallied and the winners float to the top.

2 reasons. First, there are too many games for me, a solo-dev, to play and review each one. And second, you don't want me to be the sole judge of your game! I have terrible taste 🤪.

Peer-curation solves both problems.

You already build games. You should help decide which games get promoted!

Running a festival costs money. It takes money to create and maintain the ranking and review tool, to hire a human artist for the promotional art and video production, and to run the festival’s million day-to-day organizing tasks.

I applaud those able to host free festivals! Us Indies need as many accessible festivals as we can get! This festival’s application fee makes this festival possible.

This festival is not selling placement on a Steam Sales Page. The application fee is for the festival’s off-Steam features — such as the reviewing tool, festival administration, and art and video production. Quoting Steam

No Selling Placement - You may optionally charge a participation fee for your event's off-Steam features — such as physical booth space at a convention center or a segment in a produced livestream — but you may not charge for placement on your Steam Sale Page.

In this festival, your game earns its placement by being ranked highly by your peers for polish, fun, and fit to the festival’s theme, and not by paying money to be seated high on the page.

Still, there is a risk that Steam rejects our Sales Event. In correspondence with Steam, they told me

If you are charging to participate just to cover organizing the events that's probably ok.

But that

We don't typically have hosts charge for events unless there is a physical event happening.

While I firmly believe Steam’s policy should allow this festival to be a Steam Sales Event, this style of festival is new to them. With or without Steam, all games receive detailed peer feedback, and the top games from the festival will appear on the festival website and be featured in a trailer compilation video.

Everything has risks. Apply! Your game is worth the gamble!

Assuming this festival is approved for a Steam Sales Event, there are a few things to keep in mind

• The top 30 peer-ranked games will be part of the Steam Sales Event.
• While all approved Steam Sales Events receive a page on Steam, it is unlikely that a first-time Event will get front-page featuring on Steam. But we will apply!
• To increase the likelihood of front-page featuring, the festival organizers may invite additional games to participate in the Steam Sales Event. Both games that applied to this festival, and games which did not.
• Games will be ordered and grouped on Steam’s Event page per Steam’s requirements
  • All games must fit the festival theme
  • Discounted released games at the top of the page
  • Games organized into logical categories that are helpful for customers
  • Etc.
• Steam Sales Events can take weeks to months to schedule with Steam, and can only be approved and scheduled once the participant list is finalized. So patience required 😀. I'll keep you informed and feel free to contact me at christian+gowest@thisguyismarbles.com.

Each festival participant plays and evaluates an assigned pool of 8 to 12 games. (And each game is evaluated by a similar number of participant judges.) While each judge knows which games they played and evaluated, you will not know who played, ranked, or reviewed your game. You may begin your judging as soon as registration closes and you must complete your evaluations by the judging deadline.

To judge a game, you first play the game's demo, either by downloading the demo on Steam or playing it in the browser on itch.io. While there is no limit on how much time you may spend in a game 😉, you must play long enough to become familiar with its gameplay, style, core loop, art, and polish. At the low end, plan on spending at least 20 minutes immersed in each game.

Once you are comfortable with a game, you have 3 tasks

1. Grab a screenshot of your progress in the game.
2. Drag that game's card into a sorted list to rank the game against each of the others you played. And
3. For a few of your assigned games, fill out a review form.

The review form is a mix of short paragraph answers, numerical rating, multiple choice, and similar questions. Spend time crafting a well-written considerate but honest review. Praise what the game did well and give constructive feedback and actionable suggestions for how they can improve. Write the review that you would want to receive. After all you will also get just that feedback on your own game!

Once the judging deadline has passed, you have one more important duty: verifying the integrity of your fellow judges. Each person who played your game took a screenshot of their progress. You now view each screenshot and verify that it is a real still of real gameplay from your game.

Verifying the authenticity of the detailed written reviews is trickier. As the creator of your game, you are not qualified to judge the fairness of reviews written about your own game 😀. Instead, you will judge the veracity of reviews that others wrote on the same games that you wrote detailed reviews of. While the other reviewers might not have the same opinion of each game that you did, you will mark each review as a legitimate considered critique (or not). Finish verifying the screenshots and written reviews by the verification deadline. Verification should take much less time than judging did!

With judging and verification completed, it is then my job to collate the results! A statistical model fits the participants' joint rankings of all the games. (See below for the mathematical details on how the winners are computed.) You receive your game's written reviews. And the festival announces its winners!

There will be 3 categories of winners in this festival:

1. The podium: For 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place
2. Runners-up: Games which ranked 30th or better
3. Honorable mentions: Games which placed among the top 200 ranked games

The games in the Runners-up and Honorable mention categories will be displayed (within their category) in a random order for each visitor to the site.

This festival has no physical presence. It is entirely online.

Yes. We welcome games that are not yet released! As long as your game has a publicly available demo and fits the festival theme, apply!

Yes. This festival is open to released games! Your game must have a free publicly available demo and it must fit the theme. If you meet these requirements, apply!

Yes. As long as your game fits the theme of this festival you may apply. Meanwhile, Steam places no limit on the number of themed Third-Party Steam Sales Events that a game can be part of.

Unfortunately, no.

Each person who submits a game is required to play, rank, and review a pool of games submitted by their peers. To keep each person's required work manageable (and to keep the pool assignment logic sane 😀) you may submit only a single game to this festival.

This is a themed festival. Only games which fit the theme may take part in the in-house showcase or Steam Sales Event. If your game does not fit the theme please do not register. During judging, games which do not fit the theme will be disqualified.

No. If your game is (or should be) marked as adult content on Steam or itch.io, then it is not eligible for this festival.

Cheating is not tolerated.

Fortunately, the design of this festival makes it difficult to cheat. You don't get to pick which games you rank or review. Any one person plays and ranks only a small fraction of the total games in the festival. And since each game is ranked relative to the others in that pool it is not possible to intentionally sabotage all the games in a pool (someone has to be ranked highest).

Still, I'm sure there will be cheaters. If you suspect someone is breaking the rules or spirit of the festival, please contact the festival organizers at christian+gowest@thisguyismarbles.com. All suspicious activity will be investigated and the festival organizers can remove anyone from the festival at any time.

We're watching you.

Be nice. Don't cheat.

This festival only works if each participant pulls their weight. Anyone who does not finish playing, reviewing, and ranking their assigned games is not eligible for either the festival showcase or any Steam Sales Event.

While registration is open you may withdraw your game from the festival and receive your money back at any time.

After registration has closed there are no refunds. Withdrawing a game after judging has begun tangibly harms the other participants in the festival. The other participants are counting on you to play, rank, and review their games.

Algorithmically, with guardrails.

A statistical model combines each judge's game rankings into a single best-fit global ranking. Specifically, a Plackett-Luce model fits the judges' partial rankings using maximum likelihood, lightly regularized to keep scores finite in the face of sparse data. Each judge's ranking of their pool is treated as a single observation (not as many independent pairwise comparisons—a common pitfall!) with probability equal to the chance that the first-placed game is picked as the best of the pool, times the chance the second is selected as the best of the remainder, and so on. Since the objective is convex, Newton's method quickly finds the global minimum.

A human then inspects the results and if nothing is amiss, accepts the joint ranking as the festival's result.

As an Indie Dev I’ve been told that one of the best ways to promote my game is to enter festivals. But when I look at lists of upcoming festivals, my game doesn't fit into hardly any of them! I don’t live in Europe, I’m not making a visual novel, my game doesn’t use a monochrome palette, …

Still, there were 20,000! games released on Steam in 2025, with 2026 on track to release 2,000-4,000 more. How can I stand out?

Complaining about the number of games is not a solution. And honestly, I don’t think 20,000 games is too many anyway. I know how much joy I’ve had creating my games and wish that same fulfillment on every creator!

The challenge is not too many games, the challenge is helping players find the games they want to play! I mean, while there were 20,000 games released last year, Steam also had 147 million monthly active users—growing at 10-20% a year (Almost perfectly matching the growth in games!)

The problem is not too many games. The problem is not enough festivals!

My name’s Christian Monson. I’m a solo Indie Dev with the studio This Guy Is Marbles.