The nominees for The Game Awards are due to be announced today, and one way or another, they’ll be controversial. Can you believe That Game You Like Or Hate was or wasn’t nominated in a specific category? But this year, they’re controversial before they even drop, but they shouldn’t be.
Geoff Keighley has not changed the rules on DLC this year to allow Shadow of the Erdtree to be nominated for Game Of The Year. He was accused of doing the exact same thing last year for Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, which was then nominated for (and won) Best Ongoing Game to much derision. The rules have always been so flexible as to be pointless. So it’s odd to see Keighley blamed for changing the rules when in reality Keighley has distanced himself from any rules or opinions at all.
The Game Awards Rules Have Always Been Lax
You can nominate anything you like for The Game Awards. You could put your grandmother up for Best Debut Indie, and as long as enough people voted for her Keighley would get her up on stage getting an award from Sydney Sweeney. Or at least, he would if Best Debut Indie was a category he cared about. He’s been accused of caring too much about who wins – wanting Elden Ring back, being desperate to stop an anime JRPG in Metaphor: ReFantazio taking home the crown – but the truth is he doesn’t care enough.
The awards are not a big part of The Game Awards, which is odd considering their name. But whatever games win are just background set dressing to a stream of highly profitable commercials and the chance to rub shoulders with celebrities. We’ve seen odd nominees before, and Keighley’s attitude has always been ‘Don’t shoot me, I’m only the host, organiser, and face of the entire production!’
We saw it with the aforementioned Phantom Liberty in Best Ongoing, a category it did not belong in. The award is supposed to be for live-service games that actually have ongoing development, not DLC for a game that finally fixed base issues three years later. When Dave the Diver was nominated for Best Indie, despite being produced by billion dollar corp Nexon,, it drew a shrug from Keighley. Ditto when Among Us was nominated in 2020 despite being released in 2018.
Unlike the Oscars, which frequently makes unpopular rulings to preserve the sanctity of the contest, The Game Awards is happy to let whatever happens happen. If Shadow of the Erdtree is up for GOTY (or any category), it won’t be because Keighley changed the rules or desperately wanted it to happen. It will be because he doesn’t care what happens, ever, and the large jury that votes with no communication or curation deemed DLC to be one of the best games of the year.
The Game Awards Is Destiined To Be Controversial This Year
Maybe it’s more controversial this year because of everything else going on in gaming. There are few who dread Shadow of the Erdtree’s potential nomination on quality – it’s roundly considered an excellent expansion to an excellent video game. The issue is the principle of the thing. And gaming has been short on principle this year.
A groundswell of toxicity has risen unchecked this year in gaming. It has an outsized influence in the YouTube algorithm and on X – The Everything App As Long As That Thing Aligns With Elon Musk’s Increasingly Erratic Views, but it is still disheartening to see gaming companies shove their fingers in their ears. Though it is impressive they manage to do that with their heads buried in the sand at the same time.
I don’t expect Keighley to address this at the show, and don’t think he could say anything to help, but his ‘stay out of everything’ attitude will not wash this time. He’ll be in the meat grinder with the rest of us, and it remains to be seen how a man buoyed by populism, and never having a public opinion beyond loving a video game, deals with that.
The Game Awards Will Become A New Battleground
Everything will be controversial at The Game Awards this year. Everything will be rigged. It won’t just be the regular disappointment at the lack of a nomination for a favourite game, or even the (often justifiable) dismissal of the broad jury’s taste in nominating the highest selling games in each category while better, smaller games go unnoticed.
Instead, it will all be fixed. If Black Myth: Wukong (an outsider for GOTY) and Stellar Blade (a no hoper) are not nominated in every category, some will deem it as a personal insult and fire back in kind. Black Myth is a good game that’s in with a shot, but would be the lowest rated GOTY nom ever and is divisive beyond its difficulty or its shallow narrative. It’s touch and go.
Stellar Blade on the other hand is just not quite good enough. I liked it okay, and think it might get on the docket for Best Action. I’m also looking forward to seeing a much better Stellar Blade 2 in three years. But with repetitive combat and poor writing, it’s not GOTY material. The word on the everything app is I’m predisposed to reviling Stellar Blade due to my profession, but a) I defended it before launch, b) I gave it a solid review, as did many of my peers, powering it to 81 on Metacritic, and c) my main criticism was that despite appearances, Eve wasn’t actually very sexy and that should be fixed for the sequel.
When these folk demand Black Myth and Stellar Blade sweep the board, I see replies like ‘What about Final Fantasy? What about Astro Bot? What about Metaphor? What about Infinite Wealth? What about Dragon’s Dogma? What about Balatro? What about 1000xResist?’. And the reply from these apparent fans is always the same. ‘I haven’t played most of them’.
These people don’t even really have opinions on games, they just like being mad. They’re the only people who have ever cared about Dustborn or Unknown 9, and yet they parade around their heads as if they have bested Robb Stark. If this campaign had started a few months earlier, Hogwarts Legacy being snubbed at TGA 2023 would have been huge news.
Instead, some people were surprised, some were disappointed. A few felt it was rigged and part of a campaign by journalists who collectively gave the game a review average of 84, but mostly it was accepted that 2023 was a very strong year and thus big games would miss out. In short, more people who don’t care about games will care about The Game Awards this year, and I don’t know if Keighley is braced for the hatewatch crowd.
Shadow of the Erdtree may or may not be up for GOTY by the time you’re reading this. My personal stance is that it shouldn’t be. But it’s odd to see people projecting their discontent onto Keighley’s personal stance, when he’s built a career out of not having one. The Game Awards has a much bigger problem this year, and I wonder how long it will be before anyone sees it.
