As one of the 6 “late submitters” from top-20, I sense some need to explain.
On our side it was literally one missing tab in code which prevented from completing the game if you used “Undo” button even once. (but not from playing). If the organizers said that late submission would disqualify from jury voting then we’d just leave it be with that bug, players could play for 15-ish minutes without even noticing anything. Judging by the discussion board, some other submitters were less lucky and had some problems with uploading files or even filling the form in the last minute.
A lot of bigger gamejams are rather forgiving in this matter: GMTK gamejam always gives +1 hour for everyone to late-submit the game without any penalty, and Ludum Dare even allows to fix critical bugs/broken builds at any point. Of course those gamejams don’t have any money on the line, just wanted to give some examples of unstrict deadlines. We are all humans, after all :)
And I’ve seen a topic in this jam about late submission that didn’t have any major reason to be late apart from just being late, and organizers decided it was unfair for it to qualify for the prize.
But. I 100% agree that stuff like this should be written in the rules in the future. Just as simple as “we accept late submisisons first hour after the jam ends if we decide that the reason is strong enough, write at this email address” (or, as GMTK does, just state “we could extend the deadline for 1 hour more in case people need it” and then just always extend it). It’s not ideal, but I don’t think that sticking to “super strict deadline” is good for organizers either, the bitterness of something breaking right around sumbittion time is as bad and will leave a bad memory of the event for such people…
Also I must say that submitting the game 30-60 minutes later will never change the game drastically. Good game will stay good, mediocre game won’t become good. In that 1 hour you physically can change only stuff that will transfer the game from “unintentionally broken” to “playable”.
I understand that all this won’t change the fact that this was all a bit unfair in current gamejam, but I wanted to add another point of view to “late submission” topic in general.