Looking back at the Mám padla competition

2012-03-04 | 336 words

“In the end, the TV Program application was declared the winner, while QR Code Base was disqualified - however, there was still no official statement.”

The Google competition MámPadla ended a few days ago. I participated with my HTML5 game DogPee, which I originally made just for myself, so why not enter it into the competition. The main prize was a trip to the USA for the Google I/O conference.

For a while, I was leading in the game category, but in the end, I was overtaken by Marek Tutoky with his game Five in line, which is a multiplayer version of tic-tac-toe, and even Alena Varkočková with her game Colorific. So I ended up in third place in the category and won a book of my choice.

Voting was done using the Google +1 button. You can see the table on the left. The absolute winner is the application QR Code Base - it had 809 votes at the end of the competition. Three days after the end of the competition, it has only a little under 100. A rise (and subsequent fall) of 600 votes in 3 days. WTF?? Something doesn’t seem right to me…

A small consolation for me can be that my game has 1800 users, which is more than both games that surpassed me combined, even more than the absolute winner. The most users probably have 3dnator, who placed third in the entertainment category and has almost 5000 users…

I know my game is stupid, but that doesn’t bother me. The idea may be good, but it’s quite unplayable. Besides the articles here on the blog, I haven’t done any promotion for it.

What I want to complain about, however, is the level of the organizer. In addition to problems with the competition deadline, delayed announcements, zero communication with authors, and a poorly designed website, there is mainly a complete lack of promotion. An article on zive.cz was published sometime in November, an article on the GUG blog, and then nothing.