The Uruguay Cinema and Audiovisual Agency (ACAU) organized a competitive grant for videogames development as part of the Uruguay Audiovisual Program (PUA) and I was invited to be part of the evaluation committee. This was my first time doing this kind of job and it sounded pretty interesting so I accepted. The committee was composed by Francesca Esquenazi, Camila Gormaz and me.

ACAU is mainly focused on cinema and audiovisual content and normally the grants too. This year a videogames development exclusive grant was included and the total per project was around 10k USD. There were a total of 6 slots for projects, from where, by the rules, one of them should be a project led by a woman, one should be a project that is the company’s first game and one should be a project of a company located outside the capital.

There were a total of 17 projects. Considering it was the first time for this grant and also that the Uruguayan game dev community is small, it was a good number of projects.

Each applicant had to present four different documents: dossier, distribution strategy, development plan and budget. In those documents they had to put all the information needed for the evaluation. They could include more documents if they wanted to.

The guidelines weren’t so clear in what to say or not, so each application was really different and that made the evaluation harder since it was difficult to compare the information provided. Some of them said more about the company than the game, some others more about the game design than the pitch, etc.

By taking a quick look to all the projects, it was clear the ones that presented for the first time versus the ones that already had experience with other grants, pitching games to publishers or releasing games. In general, having the rules mentioned before help in balancing the results to give opportunities to new developers, otherwise the experienced ones would always take the lead.

We decided to make our evaluations separately and then compare and select. For that, we had to consider the social, cultural and artistic impact of the proposal as well as the technical and financial viability, but there were no specific guidelines in how to do that so we didn’t necessarily follow the same approach. Once that was done, we had a meeting to compare and decide the final selection. For some projects it was clear since we were aligned and for others we had to discuss a bit but the contest rules helped us deciding.

You can check here in ACAU to see the results with the list of selected projects.

I really liked having this opportunity since it was something different to what I normally do. In some way it was like doing the role of a “Publisher” (even though I couldn’t discard projects by just reading an email xD) and that gave me a lot of insight for the future if I decide to present my own projects for grants or to publishers.

My advice to developers when presenting for future grants is to treat the application as similar to pitching the game to a publisher as possible. The committee has to make a decision based on high level information like your team, your previous experience, etc, don’t focus too much on the low level like specific game mechanics or content like enemies, etc, you can add that as optional documents if you want to but don’t expect that to make the difference.

During my analysis I found out that some of the applicants only explained how they will use the grant in the budget document but not how much they need for the complete project, and that made it a bit harder to evaluate viability since I needed to have a bigger picture of the project. I understand some of them might be just starting the development but a rough estimate of the total budget already helps. If you can include more, better.

For me, the team is one of the most important aspects when evaluating viability. A group of people already working together for some time, with experience in game dev, etc, generates me more confidence than others. As an example, if there is a proposal for a big scoped game with a complex feature (typically multiplayer) and the team is small with almost no game dev experience, it will be pretty difficult to select it. For projects weaker in that aspect, I recommend them to try to compensate that weakness with something like changing the scope or game, or if they don’t want to do that, explain how they will tackle the weakness like hiring experts, delegating part of the project, etc.

One feedback for ACAU would be to try to have more specific guidelines to help the new teams to focus on the important information and less on other things, something like Rami’s pitch deck template would help a lot.

My personal take in general is that is awesome to have grants like this one and for people to participate in them. However, I also feel like a total of 60k USD is pretty low for the videogames industry, more if you consider how it grows year by year. It feels like it is a small help so you can start your project and get in touch with publishers or maybe get another grant, to get more money. Maybe there should be more categories (or different grants) depending the state of the project.

Another nice to have is to share something about the selected projects (and maybe the others too). Now, when you read the final list you only see their names and that’s all. For someone outside the process, you know nothing about them and why they were selected and that plays against transparency, which I believe government grants should have.

And finally, I believe it would be good that part of the process was to give feedback to the participants but I understand it could be a bit impossible depending the number of projects. This was one of the reason I wanted to write this blogpost, to at least give some general feedback to them.

I wish the best for the selected projects and for all the others as well and I really hope they can continue and publish their games.

Thanks for reading!