Award ceremonies are very silly. One film, or book, or game, isn’t objectively better than all the others, because that’s not a thing. But the notion that it is nonetheless serves as the bizarre basis for such events, and it’s one that it seems the developers and players of Black Myth: Wukong are really not coping with, since their game didn’t win Game of the Year at last week’s Game Awards.
Black Myth: Wukong was always going to win the audience award at this year’s Game Awards, because it has by far the most vocal community of any game around just now. It seems that the volume of its popularity has allowed not only its most ardent fans to lose some degree of perspective, but its developers too. So it is that developer Game Science’s CEO, Feng Ji, has put out a statement on Chinese social media platform Weibo (translated by Reddit, and we’ve checked it against other bot-translations, but it’s worth noting that sarcasm or humor could easily be lost in translation—we’ve reached out to Game Science to get clarification) in which he apparently expresses his devastation at the game’s failure to scoop GOTY at Keighley’s annual bash.
“Yet, I must admit,” says Ji (according to machine translation) after he traveled to the U.S. for the event, “there’s a sense of loss and regret. More than anything, though, there’s a letting go of illusions. The games nominated this year were all exceptional, but honestly, I still can’t figure out what the criteria were for Game of the Year. I feel like I came all the way here for nothing!”
Wukong, which won both the Players’ Voice award and Best Action Game, might be considered rather successful at the awards. It was beaten to GOTY, however, by Astro Bot, Sony’s self-congratulatory and adorable third-person platform game, and faced some serious competition with the likes of Balatro, Shadow of the Erdtree and Metaphor: ReFantazio also nominated. And while Ji recognized that all these games are “exceptional,” this apparently did not stop reactions at the ceremony from being so strong that some sitting nearby say they saw Game Science developers crying when the game failed to win.
Ji’s Weibo post goes on to say that he was so confident of winning this trophy that he wrote his acceptance speech two years ago. He explains that he was more optimistic than some of his colleagues, and states that the game’s success commercially and with players was not a fluke, but rather “an inevitable outcome of Chinese culture.”
MP1st reports that some Chinese fans took the loss no better. In a grim turn of events, furious Wukong stans decided to review-bomb Baldur’s Gate 3, of all games, after Larian boss Swen Vincke’s wonderful three-minute introduction to the GOTY award. During this speech, Vincke took the opportunity to argue for an industry that looks after its developers rather than exploits them, and that makes games for art as well as profit, but this may have been misunderstood by a contingent of Wukong’s Chinese fans. MP1st claims it’s a result of a poor translation read by Chinese players, but doesn’t point to where this may have happened.
When someone has poured their life and soul into a project, it’s extremely understandable for them to become emotionally involved in the rewards and awards that follow. It’s also the case that award ceremonies are subjective popularity contests, in which wholly dissimilar things (like a 3D cartoon platform game about a robot and a tough-as-nails action game based on Chinese mythology) are artificially pitted against one another, with results based on the voting whims of a small group of individually partisan industry representatives. It must feel lovely to win, but it’s also entirely daft.
If your favorite game of 2024 was Black Myth: Wukong, then you need not craft a trophy out of tin foil, but instead just recognize that that’s enough entirely on its own, and doesn’t require the validation of a few strangers who got to vote in the Dorito man’s yearly shindig.
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