Geoff Keighley and PlayStation 5 architect Mark Cerny are putting significant money behind a new effort intended to help young game designers make the difficult jump from university projects to professional releases. Their newly established Nova Games Foundation will provide philanthropic grants, mentorship and industry support to graduating students with promising game concepts.
The initiative is designed as a long-term investment in emerging creative talent rather than a conventional publishing fund. Keighley and Cerny have each made multi-million-dollar donations to establish the foundation, with plans to continue contributing and build an endowment that can expand over the coming decades. The immediate goal is to distribute more than $2 million annually to new developers.
For many students, graduation comes at a particularly precarious point in the development of a game. A final-year project may demonstrate a distinctive idea, visual style or technical accomplishment, but it rarely has the time, budget or team structure required to become a finished commercial product. Nova Games Foundation is being created to provide a bridge across that gap without requiring recipients to give up ownership of their work.
Grants ranging from $100,000 to $500,000
Nova plans to select 20 students each year. Grants begin at $100,000, while projects considered especially promising may receive as much as $500,000. The largest awards will not arrive all at once: recipients will need to meet development milestones in order to unlock the full amount of their funding.
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That structure gives the foundation a way to commit meaningful resources while keeping projects accountable as they grow. It also reflects the practical reality of game development. A student prototype can be compelling without yet answering questions about production timelines, staffing, scope, technical risks, accessibility, testing or a path to reaching an audience. Milestone-based funding can give recipients room to answer those questions while preserving a clear plan for how the project should advance.
Most notably, the grants are not investments. Keighley has emphasized that Nova is a philanthropic program: it will not take equity in funded teams and is not looking to recover the money through sales. In an industry where early funding can frequently involve a publisher deal, investor ownership or other financial obligations, that distinction could prove central to the foundation's identity.
For young creators, retaining control may be just as valuable as receiving a large initial budget. The ability to develop an original concept without immediately surrendering a stake in a new studio or intellectual property could give recipients more flexibility when they later choose a publisher, platform partner, employer or independent route. Of course, a grant does not remove every challenge involved in finishing and shipping a game, but it can substantially change what is possible in the early stages.
A global group of university partners
The foundation is partnering with 13 university programs around the world. Named participants include New York University and the University of Southern California in the United States, Abertay University in Scotland, Cnam-Enjmin in France, TH Köln in Germany and Australia's Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
The international scope matters. Game development education and talent are not confined to a single market, and a global pool can expose the program to a broader range of disciplines, design traditions and creative perspectives. A student team approaching interactive fiction, strategy systems, experimental art games, social experiences or technical tools from one region may bring priorities that differ sharply from those found elsewhere.
Nova is currently accepting applicants from the recently graduated class of 2026 as well as the upcoming class of 2027. The focus on students and fresh graduates makes the program unusually targeted. Rather than operating as a general-purpose grant organization for established independent studios, it is built around the moment when talented newcomers are deciding whether they can realistically stay in games at all.
That decision has become tougher across much of the business. The path from education to a stable game-industry career has felt increasingly uncertain, especially as developers navigate a competitive hiring environment and the financial pressures of starting a team. A polished school project alone is seldom enough to guarantee a job, investment or publishing agreement. Nova's stated purpose is to help promising new voices find their footing at precisely that vulnerable transition.
Creative and societal value at the center
The foundation intends to prioritize projects with artistic, literary and societal value. That language suggests Nova will not judge candidates solely by short-term commercial potential, existing genre trends or the size of a project's projected audience.
Games can be many things at once: entertainment, art, technological experimentation, cultural expression and a way to explore difficult ideas through participation. A selection process that explicitly values artistic and social ambition may create opportunities for concepts that would struggle to fit a traditional pitch model. It may also encourage applicants to think beyond whether a game can be marketed easily and toward what it says, how it is played, and why its perspective should exist.
There is still an important practical component. The program is intended to help funded projects reach the market, and the grant milestones indicate that teams will need to demonstrate progress. The balance between creative merit and development viability will likely be among the most consequential aspects of the foundation's selection process. A bold idea needs resources, but it also needs a credible path from prototype to completed work.
Mentorship is another stated part of the program. For first-time developers, expert guidance can be difficult to obtain and often arrives only after a deal has been signed or a job has been secured. Advice on building a team, scoping features, communicating a project's vision, preparing for production and understanding the business side of games can prevent small early problems from becoming project-ending ones.
A philanthropic model rather than an investment vehicle
Keighley's role as the creator and host of The Game Awards has placed him at the center of the industry's public-facing calendar for years, while Cerny is one of the medium's most prominent designers and technology architects. Their foundation stands apart from their professional profiles because it is structured around donations rather than financial participation in the projects it supports.
Keighley has said he had long wanted to give back but did not consider commercial game investment appropriate given his place in the industry. He has stated that he has never owned stock in a game company or taken a financial stake in one. Nova's desired return, in his framing, is creative: helping new developers establish themselves and bring fresh games into the world.
The broader inspiration is comparable to prestigious scholarship and fellowship models that support individuals with unusual potential. Nova has been shaped by the example of programs such as the Rhodes Scholarships and the MacArthur Foundation's fellowships, with the ambition of becoming a durable institution rather than a one-time initiative.
Keighley and Cerny's friendship helped lead to the foundation, but its stated ambitions are much larger than a personal collaboration. They hope additional supporters will join them over time, increasing the endowment and enabling the program to grow across the next 10 to 20 years. If that happens, Nova could become an enduring part of the game-development ecosystem instead of a limited funding cycle.
What Nova could mean for the next generation
The most immediate impact will be felt by the 20 selected students each year. Yet the long-term value of the program may extend beyond those individual recipients. Successfully funded teams could create studios, employ other developers, inspire future students and prove that unconventional projects can find a route beyond the classroom. Even applicants who are not chosen may benefit from the attention placed on graduation projects as serious creative work rather than disposable academic exercises.
There are no guarantees in game development. Large grants cannot ensure that every prototype becomes a finished release, and mentorship cannot eliminate the volatility that has affected the industry. But non-dilutive funding at this scale is rare, particularly for creators who are still at the beginning of their careers. The decision to pair sizable awards with no equity requirement gives Nova a potentially meaningful role at a point where young designers often have the fewest options.
For Keighley, the initiative is also a personal expression of gratitude for a career spent around games. He has spoken about considering what he can do for future generations and described helping another person build a life in the medium as a meaningful form of giving back. Together with Cerny, he is now turning that idea into a foundation meant to fund not simply games, but the people who may define what games become next.
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