Independent Games Festival Finalists

What the hell is going on? In previous years, the Independent Games Festival (IGF) would announce their finalists, and I'd be quite happy to realise that I'd neither played nor heard of a single name on the list. That's how you knew they were independent, and it was exactly the way the world is supposed to work.

This year I'm on first-name terms with half the list and I've played a sizeable chunk of it. Am I just getting more widely-read, or is the IGF getting more mainstream?

Seumas McNally Grand Prize
* Blueberry Garden
* CarneyVale Showtime
* Dyson
* Night Game
* Osmos

Excellence in Visual Art
* Cletus Clay
* FEIST
* Machinarium
* PixelJunk Eden
* Zeno Clash

Excellence in Audio
* Blueberry Garden
* BrainPipe
* Musaic Box
* PixelJunk Eden
* Retro/Grade

Excellence in Design
* Musaic Box
* Night Game
* Osmos
* Retro/Grade
* Snapshot

Innovation Award
* Between
* Coil
* The Graveyard
* Mightier
* You Have To Burn The Rope

Technical Excellence
* Cortex Command
* IncrediBots
* The Maw
* Osmos
* PixelJunk Eden

I might highlight some of the games over the next couple of days but in the mean time you can get the full announcement and game descriptions at the IGF site (link). And, in all fairness, my attention was drawn to the announcement by Kotaku (link).

EDIT: I think possibly the difference is that this year most of the games involved are finished games. In previous years the IGF has been happy to acccept prototypes or games still in development; for example, Braid picked up an award in 2006, a good two years before it came out, while Castle Crashers scored one in '07.