PGDA proudly announces the shortlist nominees of this year’s Talent Award

The 3rd installment of our succesful Talent Award goes into it’s final phase with three amazing shortlist candidates! With the help of LEVEL UP – The Gaming Festival, the University of Applied Science Salzburg and Florian Jindra’s tireless support, we managed to turn the Talent Award into an institution that offers support to up and coming talents in the Austrian industry. Big thanks as well to the many helping voluntary hands behind the scenes within PGDA, who transform initiatives like these into a success.

It is with great pleasure to see the ever-increasing quality of projects across schools and universities all over Austria. This year saw an impressive number of 20 projects, covering games from all genres and a large variety of distribution platforms. So allow us a big thank you to every single educational instute in Austria providing a curriculum for games and to every lecturer conveying the essence of game development while inspiring the next generation of Austrian developers!

And as we can see once again from our judges in 2025 – a good education in Austria offers you a chance to come a long way in our global industry. Even more so we would like to particularly thank Chris Chiu (Senior Software Engineer – SIGONO), Katrin-Anna Zibuschka (Lead Programmer – Die Gute Fabrik) and Lukas Meindl (Lead UI Programmer – People Can Fly) for offering some of their precious time to review and play so many interesting submitted projects.

Last but not least, a big thank you to all students preparing the submissions and putting their creative work on the line for professionals to evaluate. As last year the judges had a very hard time choosing three nominees for the shortlist out of these 20 overall impressive students projects:

An overview of all projects including links to trailers can be found here.

To offer a transparent process PGDA defined the following categories the judges used to evaluate all submitted projects. Each category has a maximum number of points assigned, representing the overall value as well as focus for the assessment:

1. Build/playable version of the game (35 points)
2. Pitch Deck (20 points)
3. Trailer & Screenshots (15 points)
4. PR Factsheet (5 points)
5. Commercial potential (15 points)
6. Comprehensive presentation as well as interaction of all assets (10 points)

As mentioned before, it was not an easy job to come to a conclusion. The judges had a very good time playing all games and were also impressed by the quality, as well as depth of the accompanying documents. So long story short, here are the shortlist nominees for the Talent Award 2025:

I3ergsteiger	Laika	Pollucean
Platformer	Point and Click Adventure	Adventure, Simulation, Management
University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien	University of Applied Sciences Salzburg	University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten

Congratulations! We are looking forward to welcoming you at the LevelUp Festival in Salzburg, where you will staff your booth and show your incredible work to the world! You should look forward to presenting your project to the most important audience, the players! LevelUp Festival is a B2C (business to consumer) event, with a very large number of visitors, that offers a first stress test for your game. Be ready for direct feedback from critical gamers, but also very positive emotional moments seeing players enjoying your game!

Award Ceremony

Those lucky three – I3ergsteiger, Laika, and Pollucean – are advancing one field on the game board, getting closer to gamescom in Cologne in August. Who will make the race and win the booth at the WKO “Gemeinschaftsstand”? We will find live on stage at the upcoming LevelUp Festival. If you are nearby, don’t miss the chance to experience the variety of the Austrian as well as international game developer scene with a packed and interesting program the entire weekend long. As a special highlight the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg is once again hosting the Indie Area providing space for a fine collection of games made in Austria for you to play. You wouldn’t want to miss that, would you?

Educational Institutions

The Talent Award 2025 saw 20 submissions from eight different educational institutions, located in Salzburg, Upper Austria, Klagenfurt, St. Pölten, and Vienna.

Thanks for your attention and stay tuned for more information to come soon!

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