We are glad to announce that HackathonHost is now a partner of the International Game Developers Association.

For anyone who has run a chapter event, the appeal is probably obvious already. For everyone else, the short version is this: IGDA chapters run a remarkable number of game jams, student competitions, and community showcases every year, almost entirely on volunteer time. That work deserves better tooling than a form, a spreadsheet, and a scoring sheet agreed on the morning of the event.

What IGDA members get

The partnership gives IGDA chapters, partner organizations, and individual members direct access to the platform:

  • Five free events per IGDA chapter or IGDA partner organization. Five full events, not trials or limited versions. Every feature is included: branded registration, team building, jury scoring, live control, certificates, and the full post-event report.
  • A permanent 30% discount for all IGDA members through the coupon code IGDAORG, valid for the full term of the partnership.
  • Priority support for IGDA chapters and staff — a direct line to our team for setup questions and, more importantly, for event-day questions, when a fast answer actually matters.

To claim the free events, a chapter or partner organization writes to contact@hackathonhost.com or uses the contact form on this site, and we activate them on the account. There is no procurement process and no sales call.

What we are actually giving back

"Giving back to the community" is one of those phrases that usually means a discount code and a logo swap, so it is worth being specific about what is on offer here.

An IGDA chapter organizer is typically doing this alongside a full-time job. They are recruiting participants, finding a venue, lining up judges who have their own deadlines, keeping fifty people informed across three chat groups, and then, at midnight on the second day, trying to turn a pile of scores into a result that everyone in the room will accept as fair. The hard part is rarely the idea for the event. It is the twenty hours of administration that surround it, and the fact that most of that administration is invisible until something goes wrong in front of an audience.

That is the part we can take off their plate. HackathonHost handles the whole lifecycle in one place: registration under the chapter's own branding, a team-building board so solo participants actually find teammates, jury and mentor accounts, a weighted scoring rubric with normalized scores so a harsh judge and a generous one do not distort the outcome, timers and projector views for the live program, a results reveal, verified certificates, and a complete report at the end.

A few things follow from that which we think matter more than the discount.

Volunteer hours go back to the community. Time an organizer does not spend reconciling spreadsheets is time spent on the program itself: better briefs, better mentors, better feedback for the people who showed up to build something.

Participants get something to keep. Written mentor feedback and a verifiable certificate are small things individually, but for a student or a first-time jam participant they are often the only durable artifact of the weekend.

Chapters keep their own identity. This is the point we care about most. HackathonHost is white-label by design. We are not event organizers and we have no interest in becoming them — we do not run or co-run anyone's event. The chapter's logo, name, and colours appear across every screen, and participants never see our brand at all. A chapter's events remain the chapter's events, and the reputation they build stays with them.

The whole network benefits from one chapter's work. Because event setups can be duplicated, a format that works in one chapter — a rubric that produced defensible results, an agenda that kept people moving — can be handed to another chapter and reused rather than rebuilt. Chapters that already share formats informally get a practical way to do it.

Not only hackathons

Worth saying plainly, because the name misleads people: the platform is not hackathon-only. It runs game jams, demo days, student competitions, internal innovation challenges, and IT competitions generally, in person, online, or hybrid. Game jams in particular were a first-class case from the start, with mentor specializations, theme mechanics, and theme reveals built for how jams actually run. Given what IGDA chapters mostly organize, that felt worth being explicit about.

The longer view

We are treating this as an ongoing partnership rather than a one-off offer. Chapters run events on a rhythm — annually, seasonally, sometimes monthly — and a single free trial does not help much with that. The intent is to support IGDA chapter events as they grow, extend the arrangement to new chapters as they come on board, and keep improving the platform based on what chapter organizers tell us is missing.

If you organize for an IGDA chapter or partner organization, write to contact@hackathonhost.com and we will set up your account with the free events. If you are an IGDA member running something of your own, the code IGDAORG works from your first event onwards.

We are looking forward to seeing what the network builds.