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Earlier today, Square Enix published a new website to announce a contest for Japanese indie game developers to win a share of a billion yen (over 6.25 million USD) and a publishing partnership with Squenix over the next year.

The contest is for unaffiliated game developers who are working on unreleased games; the developers can be individuals or groups/companies, but they must be located in Japan. There appear to be no restrictions on what genre or style the games can be, but they should be targeted to the PC or mobile markets. It also appears that AI usage may be acceptable, within guidelines that the company has yet to publish. There will be fifteen winners, all of whom will get support from Squenix in terms of publishing and marketing the game, sales royalties, and a lump prize payment starting at 30 million yen and going up to 300 million for the grand prize winner.

Developers can start submitting their proposals in December and through next March. Starting from there, Squenix will evaluate the entries based on the developers' written descriptions and short YouTube videos, with the best entries moving on to be evaluated based on actual gameplay and finally interviews. The winners will be announced in June 2027.

The rules of this contest appear to be quite wide open, so there's no telling what sorts of games might come out of this or whether any may someday be available outside of Japan; maybe we'll see the result in a little over a year's time.



Source: Square Enix Game Contest 2026

I wonder how much of the game they have to make in order to submit something.

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Quote (Glenn Magus Harvey @ 25th May 2026 00:08)

I wonder how much of the game they have to make in order to submit something.

I would imagine that based on the timeline, Squenix are expecting something reasonably complete; I think they're leaving it ambiguous intentionally, but it would seem to stand to reason that a good concept and a game that is well-fleshed-out probably beats something that looks equally good but is mostly on paper. What do I know, though, I'm the furthest thing from a game dev! 🤷‍♂️

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