The nice fellows over at French scene website CustomProtocol decided to launch a huge homebrew contest for the PS Vita scene. This is a contest where all of your favorite scene sites are joining hands to offer bigger prizes: of course us here at wololo.net, but also psx-place.com, playstationhax.it, and CustomProtocol.com. Because it involves all sites on the Vita scene, GekiHEN is the spiritual successor to the PSP Genesis contest we organized 5 years ago.

GekiHEN PS Vita Homebrew contest – $800 in cash Prizes

There’s a total of $800 in prizes so far ($300 of which comes from wololo.net, and the 3 other sites are trusted scene sites as well so no worries with the typical “pledge that doesn’t get paid” concern), and the prize pool might increase over time (see below if you want to help with that).

For now the contest will award prizes to each winner of the following 4 categories:

• Best game (reward: $200)
• Best utility/hack (reward: $200)
• Best emulator (reward: $200)
• Best plugin (reward: $200)

The rules of the contest still need to be ironed out, and they might evolve as things progress. For example I think we’ve not fully decided yet if the winners will be decided with a vote on one of the sites, or if we will decide with the other organizing sites as “judges”.

Nevertheless, you can see the rules here.

Want to contribute as a sponsor?

Several people have contacted me to contribute as sponsors of a potential Vita Homebrew contest. Well this is it. If you want to donate money to the contest, send me an email to wagic.the.homebrew at gmail dot com, or a PM on /talk.

Due to the typical issues of people “pledging” money to various causes and not actually paying when the time comes, I will in general ask you to send me directly the money you want to donate to my paypal account, and you’ll have to trust me that the money will actually be used for the contest. Myself and the other organizers reserve in general the decision on what prize your money will be used on, but I’m open to discussion for that, if you want to create a new prize and in particular if you plan to donate a significant amount.

If you’re ok with the constraints I just described and want to participate financially, then shoot me an email and I’ll send you my paypal details! You’ll be (of course!) credited as a donator on the contest site.

Want to join GekiHEN with your Homebrew?

For now, the best way to participate to the contest is to head over to the official page and read the rules, then start developing! There’s time, entries are open until January 27th, this gives you 4 months to polish your homebrew. You’re allowed to submit updates to your homebrew as you keep improving it, so no need to “hold off” your homebrew until January! Work on something nice, release it, feel free to talk about it on forums (the homebrew must be published first on the GekiHEN site before you release it somewhere else), and you can keep updating it as you make progress.

Bottom line: Make sure the first time your homebrew (and subsequent updates) is released is on the GekiHEN site, make sure to have the splash screen in your homebrew, and make sure you’re not plagiarizing/stealing other people’s work.

There are lots of things still to be ironed out with the contest, we’ll create a subforum here for people to discuss, but that’s the gist of it. Stay tuned!

Note: I want to say thank you to the CustomProtocol folks, as they’ve done 99% of the work here (creation of the site, splash screen, rules, etc…) and I’m mostly just helping as a sponsor 🙂

More Info:

GekiHen official site and twitter.