Requirements

Required Assets

  1. A playable demo, for juror evaluation
  2. A video trailer or gameplay video & 2 screenshots (16x9)
  3. A game website (Steam/online marketplace page or Itch.io pages are acceptable) & logo in 1:1 square format

Presence

  1. Your game studio must be located in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, or Vancouver BC). We do accept up to 5 out of town games per year.
  2. We ask that games that also applied for and were accepted into PAX pass their spot to the next game in line, to give lesser known developers a chance at the spotlight.
  3. To keep our line-up diverse, a single game is limited to exhibiting a maximum of 2 times at SIX and will receive a 10% score deduction from your final juding score on your second year applying.
  4. For SIX Online, developers are not required to be on-stream, although they're encouraged to be present in Twitch chat to engage with fans or answer questions.

Limitations

  1. Tabletop and alt-control games of all kinds are highly welcome! However, it is your responsibility to coordinate delivering a copy of your game to us before the July 2nd deadline. We will not accept physical games that submit on the last day of applications.
  2. Hard-wired internet is not available due to costs, and while complimentary Wi-Fi will be provided to exhibitors, we cannot guarantee its stability or uptime. We strongly recommend offline modes, or tethering if connectivity is a must for your game.
  3. For SIX Online, streaming multiplayer and alt-control games is challenging, so we will either use single-player modes or use pre-recorded gameplay videos instead. Developers are welcome to provide longer gameplay videos for this purpose.

Selection Process

Although we wish we had room for all the games that apply, we have space for just 25 games while receiving 50-60 applications each year. Our selection process consists of a panel of volunteer jurors from the Seattle Indies community, with each game receiving at least 4 jurors playing and reviewing it.

Each juror is asked to score the game on 4 categories (Game Design, Art, Audio, and Overall) on a 1-10 scale, and the average of all 4 scores is used. The average of all juror scores is then used to determine the game's final score. At the end of jurying, we select the 25 highest-scoring games.

Our jurying system guarantees that:

  1. Your game will be played by 4-5 jurors.
  2. You will receive an email and PDF containing your juror feedback, including a list of actionable suggested improvements, and a list of positive quotes about the game. You can view a sample here for an idea of what to expect.
  3. You retain the right to use said quotes in PR & presskit materials (attributable to Seattle Indies Expo).

Costs

  1. It costs $6 to apply to SIX. Our volunteers sink a lot of time and love into jurying and providing feedback - to respect their efforts, we require this as a minimum barrier to entry.

Applications are currently closed, and will open up on May 14th.
Until then, you can sign up to get an email reminder when applications open.