It's not unusual that many people sign up for a game jam and then end up not submitting anything. But I never participated in a game jam where the submission rate was that low. Any idea what the reason could be?
It's also possible that the 2020 Jam caught some people by surprise. The jam's start data has been slowly creeping up the year. Additionally, it's likely people are trying to use new tools to score extra points. Using an open source engine adds 3 extra points to your end score. Also, 2020 is just a hectic year.
I'm sure there are many factors. Usually our submission rate is about 20% but this years' was 13.5%. I'm sure the #2020 factor is part of it, teams, etc, but I have another pet theory that our relatively low submission rate is correlated with our push to bring new people into game dev. Open Jam tries to bring two groups together: gamedevs who haven't tried open source tools, and open source devs who haven't tried gamedev. The latter group probably contribute to the relatively low submission rate, since they are new to the gamedev and gamejam scenes.
