We are glad to announce that HackathonHost is now the official and exclusive game jam platform for Gamepons — the game development ecosystem builder behind the largest program of game jams in Azerbaijan.

Every game jam Gamepons organizes, from a weekend jam in Baku to the Azerbaijan stage of an international competition, now runs on HackathonHost end to end: registration, team building, mentors, jury scoring, the live control room, certificates, and the post-event report.

Who Gamepons are

Gamepons has been building the game development ecosystem in Azerbaijan since 2020, from a base in Baku, under a mission it describes as being "Your Bridge in Gamedev" — connecting the local gaming ecosystem with the global industry.

That is not a positioning statement they have to defend. The numbers behind it:

  • 15 game jams organized
  • 150+ game development events hosted
  • 25 portfolio projects shipped by the studios they have supported
  • 20+ partners across industry, education, and government

Alongside the events, Gamepons runs an incubation program for new local studios, structured mentorship in game design, development, marketing, business strategy, and fundraising, and a game development course taught by working practitioners. It is the closest thing the region has to a full pipeline: someone can arrive at a jam as a hobbyist and leave the ecosystem a few years later running a studio with a shipped title.

A decade ago Azerbaijan had almost no game industry to speak of. A pipeline like that is a large part of why it now has one.

Why this partnership, and why exclusive

The honest answer is that this is not a cold start. Gamepons and HackathonHost have already run events together, and the arrangement is a formalization of something that was already working.

The clearest example is the Turkic Game Jam, the international jam held simultaneously across the Turkic world under the Turkic Game Developers Association. Gamepons organizes the Azerbaijan stage jointly with IGDA Azerbaijan, and has done so since the jam's inaugural 2025 edition — 14 teams and 60+ participants building under the theme "Turkic Myths and Stories," feeding into a Grand Final hosted in Baku with support from the Yaradıcı Center and the Ministry of Culture.

The 2026 edition ran on HackathonHost. In Azerbaijan that meant 75+ participants across teams of mixed experience, 19 finished games submitted inside 48 hours, and a live jury producing a result the room accepted — all of it documented in our Turkic Game Jam 2026 Azerbaijan case study. Nationally, the 2026 local stages recorded 200+ registered participants and 90+ submitted games across six countries.

Running a jam that size used to mean Google Forms for registration, a spreadsheet for teams, a second spreadsheet for mentors and jury, a chat group per role, and someone reconciling all of it by hand at midnight. Anyone who has organized a jam knows that the hard part is almost never the creative brief. It is the twenty hours of invisible administration around it, and the fact that a mistake in that administration only becomes visible in front of an audience.

Exclusivity, in practice, means Gamepons stops making that decision per event. One platform, one setup that improves each time it is reused, and a format that worked in one jam can be duplicated into the next rather than rebuilt from a blank page.

What Gamepons get

The same thing every host on HackathonHost gets, which is the point:

  • Branded registration and intake. Participants sign up on Gamepons' own pages, under Gamepons' name and colors.
  • Team building that works for solo entrants. A board where people who arrived alone actually find teammates, instead of a Discord thread and hope.
  • Mentor and jury accounts, with mentor specializations — art, code, design, audio — which matters more in a jam than in a hackathon.
  • Weighted, normalized jury scoring, so a harsh judge and a generous one do not distort the final ranking.
  • Timers and projector views for the live program, including the theme reveal.
  • Verifiable certificates with QR validation, issued from the real event records.
  • A complete post-event report — participation, teams, scores, submissions — ready when the jam ends rather than assembled the following week.

What it does not mean

Two clarifications, because "exclusive partnership" is a phrase that invites assumptions.

It does not mean we organize their events. HackathonHost is white-label by design. We are not event organizers and have no ambition to become them. Gamepons designs the jam, sets the theme, recruits the mentors, and owns the result and the reputation it builds. Participants see Gamepons' brand on every screen and never see ours.

It does not mean HackathonHost is exclusive to Gamepons. The exclusivity runs one way: Gamepons' game jams run on HackathonHost. The platform remains open to every other organizer, in Azerbaijan and everywhere else — including the many groups who run jams in the same region. If you organize game jams in Baku or anywhere in the Caucasus and Central Asia, nothing here closes a door to you.

Not only game jams

Worth restating, since the name misleads people: the platform is not hackathon-only, and it is not jam-only either. It runs game jams, hackathons, demo days, student competitions, internal innovation challenges, and IT competitions generally — in person, online, or hybrid. Game jams were a first-class case from the beginning, with mentor specializations, theme mechanics, and controlled theme reveals built around how jams actually run rather than retrofitted from a hackathon model.

If you are weighing tools for your own jam, we wrote a longer piece on choosing a game jam platform, and one on emerging game jam formats worth running.

The longer view

Ecosystem building is slow and unglamorous, and Gamepons has been at it for six years — long enough to have alumni running studios. We would rather support that kind of work than sponsor a single flagship event and call it a community strategy.

The intent from here is to keep the Azerbaijan stage of the Turkic Game Jam growing, support the jams Gamepons runs on its own calendar, and keep building the parts of the platform that jam organizers specifically ask for. The jam-side features we are proudest of exist because an organizer told us what was missing.

You can read more about the organization at gamepons.com, and browse the organizations running events on HackathonHost.

If you organize game jams or hackathons and want the same setup, start an event or get in touch.

FAQ

What does "official and exclusive game jam platform" mean? It means Gamepons runs its game jams exclusively on HackathonHost — registration, team building, mentors, jury scoring, certificates, and reporting all happen in one place, for every jam they organize. It does not mean HackathonHost works only with Gamepons; the platform stays open to every other organizer.

Does HackathonHost organize Gamepons' game jams? No. HackathonHost is software, not an event agency. Gamepons designs the jam, sets the theme, recruits mentors and jury, and owns the results and the brand participants see. The platform is white-label, so participants see Gamepons' identity rather than ours.

Can other organizers in Azerbaijan still use HackathonHost? Yes. The exclusivity is one-directional and applies only to where Gamepons runs its own jams. Any organizer in Azerbaijan, the Caucasus, Central Asia, or anywhere else can run events on the platform.

Who are Gamepons? Gamepons is a game development ecosystem builder based in Baku, Azerbaijan, founded in 2020. It has organized 15 game jams and 150+ game development events, and runs incubation, mentorship, and education programs for local studios and developers.

What did the 2026 Turkic Game Jam look like in Azerbaijan? The Azerbaijan stage, organized by Gamepons with IGDA Azerbaijan, drew 75+ participants and produced 19 finished games in 48 hours, judged by a live jury on HackathonHost. Across all six participating countries the 2026 local stages recorded 200+ registered participants and 90+ submitted games.