During Business Meet Up, a business-focused event, almost 400 industry professionals took part in individual business meetings conducted on the PINE platform. Participants listened to panel discussions with guests from the industry including among others Sebastian Wojciechowski – CEO of People Can Fly and Anton Gauffin – CEO of Huuuge Games.
Indie Celebration is an international competition for independent developers which is a great opportunity to present their games to a wider audience and win prestigious awards. This year 250 games from over 50 countries were submitted to the competition.
The highlight of this event was the announcement of the winners. The panel of judges selected the top three titles to be named Digital Dragons Best Indie Games. Also, during the event, the gaming community could visit Steam and play almost 60 free demos of games taking part in this festival. Anyone could vote to decide which game deserved the Community Vote Award. To make this hard choice a little bit easier everyone could also follow streams of well-known content creators like TheMexicanRunner, DanGheesling, 2DKiri or luality.
The first prize went to Hello Neighbor 2 by Eerie Guest from the Netherlands. It's a stealth horror game about digging up your creepy neighbor’s secrets. It turns out that the neighbor AI learns from the players. As time passes, his behavior changes and could be surprising.
The 2nd place award went to Hardspace: Shipbreaker by Blackbird Interactive (Canada).
The 3rd place award went to Medieval Dynasty by Render Cube S.A. (Poland).
The Community Vote award was given to the Polish psychological horror, Lust from Beyond by Movie Games.
The prizes for the winners were provided by AMD, a leader in high-performing computing, graphics and visualization technologies, that has been working with Digital Dragons for several years on events supporting indie game developers. Indie Celebration competition was co-organized in cooperation with the most important European conferences: Reboot with its brand – Adria Games Initiative and DevGAMM. Movie Games and Creepy Jar were the partners of the event.
For more information you can also directly contact Digital Dragons:
Sabina Misiarz-Filipek – sfilipek@kpt.krakow.pl
Useful links:
Digital Dragons – official website
Digital Dragons – Facebook
Digital Dragons – Twitter
Digital Dragons – LinkedIn
Digital Dragons – YouTube
About Sponsors:
Małopolska Region is the Main Partner of the event: the regional authorities implementing a range of projects that serve innovation and economic development of Małopolska, and its attractiveness for investors. Małopolska is a perfect location for running business, particularly based on new technologies.
KGHM Polska Miedź S.A. is a global and innovative organization that conducts mining and metallurgical activities. KGHM was established in 1961 and in 2021 celebrates its 60th anniversary with the motto: The future is made of copper!
Xsolla is the video game commerce company, powered by Transaction Engine and Business Engine, that helps developers and publishers market, sell, connect and optimize their games globally.
About Digital Dragons:
Digital Dragons is currently one of the largest international events for the digital entertainment industry in Central and Eastern Europe. The main goal of the Digital Dragons is to create a Business to Business (B2B) cooperation platform within the Polish games sector, one of the most intensively developing sectors of the creative industries. Last year’s edition of the Digital Dragons, held online for the first time, attracted 2900 participants, including 1100 companies from 65 countries. Among the representatives of the digital entertainment industry, there were leading Polish and foreign companies. 366 projects from 30 countries were submitted to the two contests: the Indie Celebration and the Digital Dragons Indie Showcase, while media coverage reached to over 1.5 million people. In 2021, the Digital Dragons will be held online as a series of events organised from May to September.
About Kraków Technology Park:
Kraków Technology Park (KPT) has contributed to the development of proper conditions for the development of entrepreneurship for 20 years. For 10 years it has managed the Technology Incubator for IT start-ups. The KPT inspires the start-up community by organising numerous events including workshops, hackathons, and conferences that help to verify business concepts. Besides these, it runs KPT ScaleUp acceleration programme. Companies may count on the support of seed funds, tax reliefs offered by the Polska Strefa Inwestycji (Polish Investment Zone) programme, and preferential office space rental conditions. The KPT is particularly focused on Industry 4.0 and the video games industry. It is the leader of the hub4industry consortium aiming to provide comprehensive support for companies wishing to implement Industry 4.0 solutions. The KPT also organises Digital Dragons – the leading games industry event in Europe. The KPT also works with the international EIT Digital, which aims to drive the digital transformation in Europe..