How much do the public ratings of our games affect the outcome of who wins or loses? Is there a group of judges that decides who wins apart from the ratings? Are they considered together? Just curious. Mainly, if it is only the ratings of people who play the games, it would be in my favor to work on publicizing my game and getting more people to play it and such. Just sayin'...

The overall results will be based on other folks voting. The experts are judging the Web Monetization and Decentralized category entries only.

If you vote yourself, your entry will get more Karma and thus be more "visible" to other participants. Plus there tend to be an approach of playing all the games, or starting from the ones that have the least amount of votes.