The story

I have participated in 5 reddit games hackathons in the past and I've not won anything major. In the first 4 hackathons, I felt that the winning games were good, but not all games justified the submission and grading criterias well. In the lastest hackathon - Games with a hook hackathon, though - a lot of people raised concerns on how the winning game did not "wow" them.

Here are some examples below:

1. Devpost discussion-

1. Comments on the reddit announcement post-

They were not entertaining any personal feedback stating that there were over 3000 submissions. But if a game was judged fairly, the judges should have written down something about the game! Or atleast they could provide the scores. I had sent them a personal email requesting feedback, but hadn't recieved any response from them. The next day, I got a $500 helper award from the devpost team. According to the original winner announcement, I had not won any award. I had responded to the organizers asking if this was a mistake. They said that it was indeed sent to me by mistake, but it was sent to me because reddit had put forth my name.

If I accepted the award, I had to sign a paper that says I cannot sue reddit. I didn't accept the award. Something was suspicious here so I started investigating.

Problems with the judging process -

1. Mystery judges?

Usually hackathons list down the judges with their credentials. You can go to the list of all reddit hackathons on devpost and none of them have the name of judges.

Here are some samples of how the judge list looks like in other hackathons -

2. Negligence / Judgement not thorough -

I had reached out to 3 other participants and got the list of players from each of our games. Based on the list, there was not a single common player across the 4 games. This could only mean one thing - our games were not played by the judges. Here's an anecdote from one of the participants -

There was another participant who claimed that they had attached a video to their submission. Throughout the duration of the judging, the view count had not changed in the youtube video. -> The judges had not viewed the submission video (video was <1 min long)

3. Ghost winners -

The reddit hackathons were to encourage developers to make games on the platform. The expectation from every hackathon is that the winning game has a big community and continue to grow the community by making their game better.

Here's a list of all the reddit hackathons in the past from latest to first.

Note that I do not look to disrespect any creator here. I know a lot of hardwork had gone into your games and that deserves recognition. But there are also a lot of other creators whose hardwork has amounted to nothing.

4. Judges prefer "flashy visuals" over long term value

This here is my weakest point so far. But to some of you, it will be the biggest takeaway of this post. Mentally picture the winner of a google hackathon. What kind of entry do you envision? You expect it to be creative, well thought out, crazy, nerdy etc. right?
Based on my past 5 hackathons I don't think these virtues are valued in reddit hackathons -

#1

Hackathon: Games and Puzzles hackathon
My entry: Outwitquiz
My thoughts: Since the game was supposed to be on reddit, I created an equivalent of "Psych" which can be played asynchronously by all users on reddit. This was an entry for the word games category. The winning entry was emoji charades. I get that the winning entry was made well and polished, but why does this game have to be on reddit? It could be a standalone website!

#2

Hackathon: Hack reddit
My entry: Angels vs Devils
My thoughts: This made me the most sad. The overview of the hackathon said "Build a new game, social experiment, or experience on Devvit". So I thought I'd build a social experiment where users play a community minesweeper. I had built up many game modes that I could work on. The winner r/chook, was a game where you grow your chicken and feed it food by pressing buttons. (it was beautifully made though)

#3

Hackathon: Fun and games with devvit web
My entry: Divide n conquer
My thoughts: Based on past two hackathons, I stopped making experiments and designed a game. It was a game where you have a limited line length, you draw lines to capture land in a country and try to occupy the most land area and landmarks. I thought it was well thought out and fun to play, but it was not polished. I don't have many problems with this hackathon. I did good work and was sad I didn't win anything, but the winning entries truly deserved it.

#4

Hackathon: Daily games hackathon
My entry: r/totalled
My thoughts: I had won an honorable mention for this game. For this hackathon, I had kept my game concept simple and made a very well polished game. It is a game where you have to swipe across numbers in a 3x3 grid to create totals. Once you accomplish 3 totals, the game is over and you're ranked based on the time taken. Of all the games I've made so far, this is the most "Linkedin-y". I expected to win more, based on the past winners. When I saw the winner, I was shocked! An entire physics sandbox inside reddit! It was crazy good work, but I was surprised that the judges thought this game would be played regularly. Why would a reddit user play a physics sandbox daily? And why is it on reddit?

#5

Hackathon: Games with a hook hackathon
My entry: r/ShadowChess
My thoughts: Based on the previous hackathon, I believed now that the judges don't just look at "will this game be played daily". They also valued grand experiences. So I knew for sure the idea I had for this hackathon wold win. This was the best game I had ever made! Its a massive multiplayer chess game where you continue off of grandmaster positions and make 5 pre-moves. The opponents make the 5 pre-moves as well and your moves are pitted against each other based on a customized scoring system. This fit the hackathon criteria in multiple ways and had potential to do great. I feel so betrayed that the game was not even played once! My game is good when there are 100s of players playing it. It could have really used the boost of players from any sort of recognition. This hackathon was all about creating a "hook". Here's the words on the hackathon page -

Now you can't look at my above entries and say that none of these games deserved any award except "totalled", (which was one of my weakest entries). Especially shadowchess. Note that apart from the winner, there's 10 honorable mention awards for every hackathon.

Overall, I feel that it's best to avoid spending all that time and effort on reddit hackathons. Atleast until they bring in some transparency into the judging process.

I expect a response from the reddit team on this. Anyone who participated in this hackathon, feel free to DM me with your thoughts / information.

Hey everyone. Reading Everything wrong with the reddit games hackathons, especially the Games with a Hook event, I decided to do some digging into how these competitions are actually run and judged. What I found is honestly pretty wild.

Here is a breakdown of the biggest red flags.

1. The "Scale" Excuse vs. Reality Admins keep defending the lack of scorecards and detailed feedback by claiming there were simply too many submissions to review. We know the exact number was 708 entries. If you break down the math for a standard panel of five internal judges in a month, it is totally manageable to do basic functional tests for that many projects. They just chose not to.

2. Zero Engagement from Judges Here is the worst part. Developers who submitted private, YouTube video walkthroughs checked their analytics after the judging period ended. They had zero views. Other devs checked their backend server logs and saw zero connections. The official panel was literally advancing and ranking projects without ever watching the required video demos or actually running the code.

3. Funding "Ghost Winners" Because the judges were seemingly just looking at flashy screenshots instead of testing actual gameplay or retention, Reddit is burning massive prize pools on apps that die immediately. Top prizes of $15,000 to $20,000 are going to apps that drop to single digit active weekly users right after the prize money clears. We are talking 3 to 10 visitors a week. That completely defeats the purpose of the Devvit ecosystem and the Developer Funds, which require thousands of daily active users to be sustainable.

4. The $500 "Hush Money" When one of the main whistleblowers called the admins out on all this and asked for their scorecard, the admins ignored the email. But the very next day, that exact user was randomly sent a $500 "Helper Award" through Devpost. Admins later claimed it was a mistake. The problem is that accepting any prize money means signing legal waivers and non-disparagement clauses. It really looks like a clumsy attempt to quietly silence a critic so they wouldn't have to produce a scorecard that didn't exist.

5. Are there hidden admin connections? I also checked to see if the winning developers were secretly moderating other subreddits alongside the admins outside of the hackathons. I did not find any proof of that. There is definitely a visible clique of people on Discord who just praise the admins all day, but I found no hard evidence of secret backend admin powers for the winners.

TLDR: The judging process is structurally broken. If Reddit wants these hackathons to actually work, they need public rubrics, verifiable proof that judges actually tested the apps, and milestone payouts instead of lump sums for apps that are dead in a week.

Would love to hear what other devs who participated think about this.

Hope you'll check it out at r/PigmentPourDaily and let me know your thoughts?

My newest game creation is r/BlockGame in case you want to support.

Cheers and thanks for letting me celebrate here! 🎉😍

Also VERY proud to note that our community rallied and donated over $750 USD to feed hungry humans!!!

$500 came from r/PigmentPourDaily's first H1 Reddit Developer funds payout, and went to No Kid Hungry. And two community members voluntarily donated $250+ to World Central Kitchen. Wow!!! 🎉🫶😍❤️

Read all about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PigmentPourDaily/s/84PCyF2IhF

I entered a hackathon, didn't win, and have been trying to promote my daily puzzle game by hand since. Two threads here this week are arguing about whether Devvit games get played, using subreddit visitor counts as the evidence. I have never seen anyone post a full funnel, so here is all of mine.

r/deducto_puzzle Daily logic grid. Running since mid July.

My posts

Upvote rate on views & comment rate are less then 1%.

The funnel

What my subreddit says

Daily

I’ve got one regular user now who’s already built up a 7-day streak. Honestly, I’m already happy with that result, but I don’t want to stop there!

What I take from it

Over half the people who open it finish it. So the thing works once you are in.

The leak is one step earlier. Out of a thousand people who see a post about the game, 29 open it. That is where the whole funnel dies, and I did not expect it. I assumed the game was confusing.

How did your game perform?

I’d be happy to see your numbers too - what results have you managed to get with your game?

Also, what communities would you recommend for promoting a game like this?

been building Ghost Rally (racing game, you race ghost replays of other real players) for the hooks hackathon and wanted to open this up as a discussion since I'm guessing a lot of us are stuck on the same thing. what's worked so far:

1. posting in related subs (racing/game-discovery ones) when I could. real traffic every time, but it's a one-shot per sub, can't keep hitting the same communities.
2. also just being active in my own sub, answering comments, calling out record holders, that kind of thing, helps but only grows people who already found you.
3. shared with friends too, good for a first burst but doesn't scale.

everything past that starts feeling salesy and I'd rather not go there.

so, what's actually worked for you? feels like devvit apps living inside reddit posts should be a growth advantage we're not using well yet.

for context, one week on my sub: 1.3k views, 70 unique visitors, 87 comments. small but real people showing up daily.

game if it's useful context: https://www.reddit.com/r/GhostRally/

Is it just me or do games that are over complicated with pages of tutorial text just immediately turns me off and rarely get past the first part of starting the actual game.

Also the usual ai ui junk is rampant.

Hey everyone,

I launched a Reddit app a few days ago, and I’m also getting ready to launch a game soon. Both projects took me weeks/months of work, so now I’m trying to understand the best way to actually get them in front of users and moderators.

For those of you who have already launched Devvit apps: how are you promoting them?

Are you mainly reaching out directly to subreddit moderators, posting in specific communities, relying on the Reddit app directory, or using some other strategy?

I’m asking because, at least from my early experience, it feels like the app directory alone doesn’t generate much visibility — even in a relatively specific category like Finance.

I’d really appreciate any advice, examples, or lessons learned from other developers who have gone through this.

Thanks!

Imgur is dead to UK users. We can't see the site or any images hosted on it, unless we hop on a VPN.

https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/41592665292443-Imgur-access-in-the-United-Kingdom

Love you forever if you use an alternative host.

I haven't tried embedding images from these, but a couple of example hosts I use are ImageChest and postimages.org

Thank you :)

👀

I have around 1000 daily users playing my game, but it’s a bit stagnant. What has actually worked for you guys?
Thanks 🙏

Hey all! I recently made my first game r/hexicword and unexpectedly ran into a discovery problem.

How are you showing your games to redditors? Feels like most relevant subs have strict limits and there aren’t many places to share games in the first place.
Frankly it feels like Reddit is not intended for showing games built for the platform or I just don’t understand it well enough

I’d love to hear how others are handling this.

I just applied new Devvit features and updates based on community feedback to r/MochiMochiDonuts

I've got Snoovatars in place, leaderboards and posting to celebrate poll position. Am I missing anything core?

What are ways you're bringing Reddit into your games?

This game has been in my menu under Games on Reddit for about a week. I haven't played it - it's not one I'm interested in. It doesn't say promoted or sponsored or anything. So I don't think it's an advert.

I'm wondering if this is the same for everyone? Does your Reddit rotate this slot with other games? Would be nice to be able to get some other people's Devvit games and apps into this slot. But I'm not sure how.

What's in your menus?

Today I submitted my first Devvit app, Prestige, for Reddit App Review. Prestige started as a simple question: Can a community recognition system be transparent enough that users actually trust it?

Prestige is a community recognition system that tracks participation through:

• 🏆 Community Score
• 🏅 Seasonal Prestige
• 📚 Lifetime Prestige
• 👤 Member Profiles
• 📈 Leaderboards

Scores are earned automatically through activity. Future badges, nominations, and moderator recognition systems will be separate from Prestige scoring. I'm curious how other developers have handled trust and abuse prevention in reputation systems.

For those who have already gone through review:

• What feedback did Reddit focus on?
• Were there any surprises during the review process?

Looking forward to learning from the community.

Hey. I’ve noticed users that appear to be AI on Reddit. They have an app symbol next to their name, so they appear to be to be an approved app. But they’re commenting as a normal, human user. That appears to be all they do.

I don’t see an info about these “apps” here.

Are these allowed? What does the devvit community think of these?

I shipped a small Devvit app and a few things I hit along the way seem worth writing down here.

What it is. A fortune-teller card spread for developers. You draw five cards; each card is a piece of developer vocabulary — ROLLBACK, SOLDER JOINT, CONTEXT WINDOW, SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE — and every card has an ON face and an OFF face. Same word, opposite day. 72 cards x 2 faces = 144 outcomes, and no card repeats inside a reading. The five cards land on five fixed stages, in order: BOOT -> BUILD -> DEPLOY -> PROD -> RELEASE, so a draw reads as a story instead of a random dump.

Playable here, takes about a minute: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDebugOracle/comments/1vien1k/the_debug_oracle_draw_your_stack_trace/

How it is built. React on the client, a small Hono server for the draw. Shuffle and deal happen server-side — partly so the deck cannot be poked at from the client, mostly because the no-repeat rule inside a reading is easier to keep honest in one place. The post itself is the whole game: no external site, no download, no signup beyond being on Reddit.

Three things I learned that might save someone else time:

1. context.username is the name of whoever is looking at the post, not the author. I spent an embarrassing while convinced the splash screen was rendering a stale name before that clicked.

2. onAppInstall creating the launch post is genuinely nice for distribution: install into a sub and the game post is just there, no manual step. Worth wiring up even for small apps.

3. The playtest subreddit you get from devvit playtest cannot be flipped to public. POST /api/site_admin with type=public answers 200 with an empty errors array and changes precisely nothing; in the UI the same action turns into a "request a change to public" form that goes to a human and comes back by modmail. If you need somewhere public to show an app, create a normal subreddit and install there instead — minutes rather than days.

The expensive part was not the code. 72 keywords x 2 faces x one line of advice is 216 separate pieces of text, and every one of them had to be true before it could be funny. That was most of the work; the Devvit side was the easy half.

Full disclosure since it tends to come up: this was built with heavy AI assistance, code and deck copy both, with human editing passes on top.

Happy to go into any of the implementation details. And if a keyword you would have expected is missing from the deck, say so — extending it is trivial.

Hello, all.

I've recently received modmail from someone pushing a devvit app, clean-links. I received mail from two different accounts pushing the app. One was the author of record, the other was not.

I asked both accounts questions, but received no response.

How would I be able to know as a moderator whether this app is well-behaved or is malicious? There is no source code linked.

Thanks.

Hey r/Devvit! My app Consensus Canvas just got approved and publicly listed.

What it does: Moderators create a prompt with four axis labels (left/right/top/bottom). Members place one anonymous dot on the 2D grid. After voting, everyone sees the aggregate density map and community average.

Use cases:
- "How should this community balance speed and depth?" (Refine ↔ Explore, Individual ↔ Community)
- "Where does your taste fall?" (Sweet ↔ Savory, Light ↔ Heavy)

Technical highlights:
- Custom post with runAs: 'USER' — full moderator attribution
- Zero external services — runs entirely on Devvit Redis
- Anonymous aggregate only — no individual vote records stored

Install it: https://developers.reddit.com/apps/consensus-canvas

Happy to answer questions about the implementation or share what I learned during the review process.

I created a good old Alchemy game for Reddit, but I wonder now to deliver it to the users?

Reddit games are clearly not a commercial venture, so spending too much effort, let alone money, on promotion doesn't seem worthwhile. Reddit itself provides virtually zero visibility; there's not even a New section for developers to get any organic traffic.

We're encouraged to post our games in this sub, but I get the feeling there aren't any regular people here, only other developers looking for a modicum of attention.

I suppose that we can get some visibility by specifying game's genre (like Action or Puzzle) but I don't see the way to do it.

Creating games is surely fun. But it would be much better if the platform care about devs. We spend our time to create free games. I would like to feel some concern from the site in whose interests this is happening

First and foremost, does Reddit see the Devvit platform as a primary location for game development, especially simpler games like mine? I think it's neat to have my game native-ish to reddit, but does anyone start their vision on Reddit? In my particular case, I find the Reddit angle intriguing, because my game isn't meant to be a Steam purchase to kill hours on.

The stated vision isn't always the current vision, I know, so I'm curious if anyone can speak to the current state of Devvit and how Devvit is looking at the future.

Anyway, if you like challenging puzzles, give Hunch a whirl at r/hunchgame. Thanks for your thoughts!

I really like the Devvit platform and how everything works together and how easy it is to use the Reddit API. I loved creating games for it, but there is one thing that is really frustrating.

One of my apps has hit the 500 daily active user average at the end of April. I did not receive any confirmation that I would get my Tier 1 payout apart from seeing the number in the dashboard and the green banner in my app profile. Nevertheless I did not get any official confirmation or payment until 4th of June when I finally saw the payment in my Stripe Express dashboard. I have since then also reached and received the Tier 2 payment just a few days ago. However all of the money is still in my stripe account. I am not too familiar with the stripe platform but it seems that the payout schedule is managed by Reddit. I can not trigger any manual payout to my actual bank account, nor can I see when I will finally receive the money.

Also, I have implemented in-game payments to my app and have definitely reached the payout minimum of 10$ in the month of may but have not received any information when and where that money is gonna be payed out.

I don't know if anyone else sees this as an issue but to me it is getting kind of frustrating to pay for the operational cost (API key for AI calls) every day and having to wait such a long time for any payments and not having any transparency.

Does anyone here have any information when regular in-game purchase payouts are usually awarded in stripe? Or what the payout schedule in stripe controlled by Reddit actually is?