https://www.indiegamegarage.com/
A chance to win a 500$ taco bell gift card if your indie game makes it to the top picks.
Interesting. The prize seems a little fuzzy (taco bell gift cards and access to industry experts), but it might be fun for somebody who was already making a game.
I wonder what Taco Bell’s “angle” is here.
Well, do you want NO 500$ worth of tacos? Or 500$ worth of tacos? Even if It’s not cold hard cash, I really enjoy free stuff.
Most members are European
Probably had to do a websearch to find out what Taco Bell is.
Mmmmm… What I would do with that gift card… oh boy, many happy days. Too bad I don’t have a project to enter at the moment, though.
Someone from jgo needs to win and share tacos with the forum members! 
So… a taco company, with little to no experience in the game market, is basically farming games from devs, with no guarantee they won’t use them for whatever evil purposes they can dream up…? Seems a bit suspicious, but I’m kind of a suspicious person 
I’m not putting on my tinfoil hat just yet, and maybe this is just a fun little publicity thing that some advertising guy who happens to enjoy indie game development managed to convince Taco Bell to do… but I think it’s important to note that this isn’t free.
If we value a programmer’s time at 50,000 US dollars per year (which is going to depend on skill level and where you live), then that’s, what, 25 dollars per hour? So $500 is about 2-3 days worth of work. Now the “grand prize” of a $500 Taco Bell gift certificate doesn’t seem like such a freebie, considering how much time most of these games will already have invested in them- plus, the time you spend submitting to this Taco Bell thing is time you don’t spend actually developing your game.
All of that being said, this could still be a fun thing to do, especially if you already have a game worth submitting. But the value of these games (measured in developer time) is much more than a $500 gift certificate. So it ain’t free.
My guess is that some young guy (or gal) in the advertising department is into indie game development and wanted to do something fun. They probably showed the higher-ups some numbers on esports (“look at how many young people are into video games, we should totes tap that market”) and said “give me a month and a $1000 budget for prizes, and we’ll have a contest that gets Taco Bell trending in this demographic”.
Game developers get some “free press” (see above rant) for their game, Taco Bell gets some “relevancy” in the indie gaming world, everybody wins. I would guess that the most evil thing Taco Bell would do is use clips from the games entered in a commercial advertising that this contest happened.
My only major complaint is that their blog looks interesting, but the 6 links (like “put a dragon in there”) at the bottom don’t actually go anywhere.