Unity Awards

The old model

Before 2025, the community nominated games and the Made with Unity team did the rest. For each nominee we had to track down a contact through the sales team, then chase permission to use their game, which took weeks and sometimes more than a month. Then the brand team made every social asset by hand.

It did not scale. The more nominees there were, the longer the lead time, and the less the studios had to share.

The four phases

The program ran in four phases, each with its own audience.

Gate check

1. 1Registration

   Gate check

   Customers nominate themselves, and every registration is checked for complete details.

2. 2Internal vote

   Unity employees vote, with a set number of votes per category, to pick the nominees.

3. 3Public vote

   Once the nominees are announced, anyone can vote, and nominees make their own social cards.

4. 4Showcase

   A live event announces the winners and shows games with news or launches coming up.

Phase 1: Registration

I flipped the script. Instead of the community submitting candidates, we asked our customers to nominate themselves. Data from earlier years suggested the community were already doing this, so I made it the process.

Self-nomination meant we had a contact at the studio we could reach directly, instead of hunting for one through the sales team. It also meant permission came with the submission.

Registration had a validation step. If a submission was missing necessary details, I could flag it as needing more. It then went back to the studio's contact, who returned to the site to complete their registration.

Phase 2: Internal vote

This phase was open only to Unity employees. Each had a set number of votes to spend across the candidates in each category, which let us narrow the field down to the nominees.

Registration stayed open to everyone else while this ran. People following the awards could not see the candidates yet, but they could still sign up and be ready for the public vote.

Phase 3: Public vote

Once the nominees were announced, voting opened to the public. Voters picked the games they thought were best in each category. They could vote in one category or several, submit their votes, and change their minds.

This was also when nominees could log in to their dashboard and start promoting their game.

The social card generator

Nominees needed branded social assets, and the brand team was already tied up with the Unite event happening at the same time. So the brand team designed the template once, and I built a generator around it.

A nominee opened the generator and the template cards were already there, ready to download in the size for the platform they wanted: a social post, a square or a story. They could edit a card to change the name, the studio, the legal line and how their image sat on it. It was its own self-contained process, with no ticket and no queue.

What they could not change was what the card said about the award. The status and the category were fixed, along with the call to action and the awards logo, so nobody could claim a win or a category they had not been nominated in. Studios had real freedom over their own card, and the claim it made stayed true.

Try it below. This is a recreation, with no real template or art, but the controls and the locks work the way the real ones did.

EditableLocked: what is fixed on every cardSelect Locked to see what a studio could not change.

Example Awards(locked)

Nominee · Best 3D Visual(locked)

Your Game Here

Example Studio

Learn more at awards.example(locked)

© Example Studio. All rights reserved.

Size

Social post1200 × 630Square1080 × 1080Story1080 × 1920

Game name

Studio

Legal line

Image zoom

Image position

Reset

That took the work off the brand team and put the promotion where it worked best, in each studio's own community. Fans who arrived to vote for one game found others, voted for those too and shared them.

Phase 4: Showcase

When voting closed, we hosted a live event to announce the winners. We also used it to show other games that were making announcements or launching soon, so the showcase was worth watching beyond the awards themselves.

You can watch the live stream on YouTube.

Built, not bought

The budget for a third-party awards platform was denied, and an off-the-shelf tool would not have given me what the program needed: self-nomination, validation, voting for two audiences and the card generator. So I built it over four months.

It has a registration form, a dashboard where nominees manage their details and assets, the card generator, internal and public voting, a public showcase of the nominees, and an admin panel for me and my colleague.