If the IGEA wants to represent all Australian game developers^[1] then perhaps they should stop giving preferential treatment to Victorian devs.

And maybe MIGW should be called "Melbourne and International Games Week" because it sure does seem like Australian devs from outside of Melbourne are an afterthought at best. The fact that the MIGW Steam sale exclusively features devs from Melbourne and ices out everyone else^[2] is fucking egregious. The people who make this happen will say directly to your face, "You should get your state's screen org to organize something like this," with the full knowledge that getting a dedicated Steam sale is incredibly hard and getting more than one sale for the Australian scene is pretty much a nonstarter.

Been dealing with this shit for literally ten full years now and I am glad the Melbourne echo chamber's threat of ostracization has finally failed to stop people speaking up about it. MIGW is taking up all the oxygen in the room and we are all suffering as a result. Choking out the rest of the scene is great for Melbourne in the short term but will stunt its growth longterm... nobody seems to give a shit about that, though!

It would be so easy to not actively do this. Vic's arts bodies can support local gamedevs without pushing to exclude people from interstate. This has always been and always will be the case. They need to start listening. A rising tide lifts all boats unless you're hoarding the resources required to build the damn things.

^[1] Which, of course, is a convenient fallacy; they will always act first and foremost in the interests of the management teams of the biggest studios, anything positive indies get is pretty much only by accident. They are not a union, they are a business association.
^[2] Except for SMG Studio, for some reason?