The finalists for the inaugural Independent Games Festival Mobile came from a field of more than 50 entries, reflecting the growth and diversity of mobile platforms.

Punch Entertainment's social networking game Ego and Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab's waste disposal strategy puzzle game Backflow led the nominations.

Besides Ego and Backflow -- both nominated for the Innovation in Mobile Game Design category and the $10,000 IGF Mobile Best Game award -- other multiple nominees included Capybara Games', a food chain-based puzzler Critter Crunch, mobile RTS Steam Iron: TheFallen and Nintendo DS drawing-RPG Drawn to Life.

Established in 1998 by the CMP Game Group, IGF aims to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers.

Alongside finalists in the 10th annual IGF Main Competition and Student Showcase, the finalists for the IGF Mobile Competition will be showing their games at the IGF Pavilion during CMP's Game Developers Conference (GDC).

GDC is the world's largest industry-only event dedicated to the advancement of interactive entertainment. The forum takes place Feb. 18-22 at San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center.

The IGF Mobile ceremony will take place during next year's GDC Mobile, with the winners also highlighted at the main Independent Games Festival Awards during GDC 2008.

Sponsorship for the IGF Mobile competition was provided by NVIDIA, a provider of enabled applications processors for mobile devices.

Understanding & Solutions, a British consulting company, forecasts that mobile gaming will outpace console and handheld gaming and reach $6 billion in sales by 2011, nearly doubling the $3.6 billion the market is expected to take in globally this year.