The initial rounds of judging to select up to Top 20 finalists and the Top 10 will be done by Google, an independent judge and by the audience attending the final event. The final round will take place live at the showcase event in London, where the winners and runners up will be selected by our panel of industry experts.  

Industry experts

Chris Lee - Angel Investor

After over a decade of co-founding his own studios, including Media Molecule and FreeStyleGames, as well as holding Vice President positions at both Activision and Electronic Arts, Chris now provides investment and advice to mobile gaming studios across Europe. This roster includes Hutch, Space Ape Games, MAG Interactive, Armada Interactive, Gumbug, Supersolid, Another Place Productions, Future Games of London and Yakuto. 

Andrew Parsons - Devolver Digital

Andrew is a producer with the indie publishing label Devolver Digital. Since his introduction to the industry in 2005, he has worked in multiple disciplines in both publishing and development. His life at Devolver Digital mainly involves solving problems for developers and doing everything necessary to get beautiful games made. He enjoys swimming, tea, and maintaining a healthy level of cynicism. 

Barry Meade - Fireproof Studios

Barry worked for various studios as a game designer and artist / animator until,  together with five friends, they formed Fireproof Studios, a small contract-art team. After many years of saving money, Fireproof released their first game The Room in 2012 which went on to be #1 in over 60 countries.

Matteo Vallone - Initial Capital

Matteo is a Principal at Initial Capital where he invests in early stage consumer start ups and games developers. Before joining Initial Capital, he worked at Google as Head of Games Business Development for Google Play in Western Europe.

Are Mack Growen - London Venture Partners

Are Mack Growen is the VP of Product Portfolio at London Venture Partners, where he works on supporting portfolio companies on everything product related, and also finding new opportunities. For over 12 years he has worked in GM and VP roles to build game studios in Asia and the west, at Playfish, EA, gumi and others, delivering multiple hit games played by more than 45M users.

Ryan Holowaty - Noodlecake

From marketing, game direction, business operations and more, Ryan wears a lot of hats at Noodlecake. From the first party games like the award winning Super Stickman Golf series, to the numerous games Noodlecake publishes from talented indie developers all over the world, Ryan works on each and every game that Noodlecake releases.

François Alliot - Nerial

François Alliot is a game developer. Through Nerial, a studio he founded 3 years ago, he has worked on 5 games : Singular, Magic Shot, Passengers, Devouring Stars and Reigns.

Reigns, his winning game of the last edition of the Google Play Indie Games Contest, was made with Mieko Murakami (art), Disasterpeace (audio direction), Matéo Lugo (music), Eric Van Amerongen (sound design). François did the development and the writing. He's now working on the sequel, Reigns: Her Majesty.

Touko Tahkokallio - Supercell

Touko is a game designer and a game lead at Supercell. He has been part of the teams (it's truly a team effort!)​ that created Hay Day, Boom Beach and Brawl Stars. Touko also has a long history with board games and has designed many board games - Eclipse being the most acclaimed one. Before developing games, Touko was a theoretical particle physicist trying to solve the mysteries of the world!  

Josh Naylor - Unity

Technical Evangelist at Unity, Josh leads the team covering Europe, Middle East and Africa. Their mission is to teach, inspire and help educate the amazing Unity community, with workshops, talks and feature demos. A Computer Science graduate and game developer himself, Josh’s favorite things to make in Unity are 2D twitch like games and VR experiences.  

Google

Shannon Low - Google Play

Shannon heads up the Google Play business development team in EMEA and helps top app and game developers succeed.

Serena Shih - Google Play

Serena is the Apps and Games business development manager for China, helping local developers succeed globally on the Google Play platform. In addition, Serena leads Google Play’s indie efforts to grow the Chinese indie community.

Damien Mabin - Google Play

Damien is a former game developer  now helping others with OpenGL optimization, plenty of Android APIs & monetization.