Key Takeaways
- The Game Awards are, notoriously, more interested in creating a big spectacle than lauding the developers that keep the industry running.
- It usually does this by inviting celebrities with tangential ties to the industry to make appearances at the awards. This year, Snoop Dogg is a musical guest. Why?
- Seriously, how much money did they pay him? Couldn’t that money have been put to better use? Come on.
I quite enjoy the musical guests at The Game Awards. These performances are usually tied to the year’s biggest releases – for example, last year saw Heilung performing a gorgeous song from the then-upcoming Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2. Sam Lake and The Old Gods of Asgard performed the excellent Herald of Darkness musical number from Alan Wake 2, complete with choreography. And The Game Awards Orchestra, as usual, performed a wonderful medley of songs from the Game of the Year nominees, as well as a song from also then-upcoming Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth alongside Loren Allred.
These performances usually serve as an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the often overlooked soundtracks of video games, which are very often ignored in favour of other aspects of the medium. But this year’s awards has one strange inclusion. The understandable acts on the lineup are Twenty One Pilots, d4vd, and Royal and the Serpent, who are performing songs from Arcane’s second season. The weird one is Snoop Dogg, who will not just be performing, but debuting an entirely new track at the show.There are more musical guests who haven’t been revealed at the time of writing. I’m dreading it.
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What Does Snoop Dogg Have To Do With Games?
I get it. Everybody loves Snoop Dogg. He’s funny, charming, prone to spectacle, and has cross-generational appeal. He’s tied in many ways to the industry – apart from having featured in tons of games because of his status as an icon, he’s most recently been in Fortnite’s November season, Chapter 2 Remix. He plays video games in streams on Twitch. He even hosted the 2004 Spike TV Video Game Awards, the distant predecessor to The Game Awards. There are links.
But it would be disingenuous to pretend that Snoop is a musical guest at The Game Awards this year because he was in Fortnite. He’s in The Game Awards because he’s a hugely famous celebrity, and the show is trying to legitimise itself as a ‘serious’ award show by tying itself closely with celebrity culture instead of being taken on its own terms.
This is a trend that’s continued from last year despite having received quite a lot of backlash from those within the industry. Last year’s awards were packed full of celebrities who were inexplicably given more time to ramble than actual developers were for their acceptance speeches, despite the aforementioned celebrities having relatively tenuous connections to the industry. Matthew McConaughey, Anthony Mackie, and Simu Liu were all given way too much time on stage. Why was Gonzo the Muppet up there? And Timothee Chalamet presented the GOTY award. It was ridiculous.
GOTY is usually presented by the previous year’s winner, but it’s unclear if Elden Ring’s Hidetaka Miyazaki declined or was not invited.
These celebrities have some ties to video games, enough that we can shrug and say, ‘Sure, I guess.’ McConaughey and Liu are in upcoming video games Exodus and Stormgate. Mackie worked on the Twisted Metal adaptation. But then there’s the others. Chalamet used to… mod controllers as a kid? Gonzo isn’t even a real person. Come on.
Follow The Money
This in itself isn’t necessarily bad, just kind of embarrassing. The Game Awards refuses to give as much time to the people that work in the industry as it will celebrities who attract attention. I understand why it does this – to successfully ingratiate itself with mainstream viewers, it has to give itself mainstream appeal. Celebrities are a shortcut to that.
But these celebrities aren’t on stage for the love of the game(s), they’re there because they’re paid lots of money. Where does that money come from? As Esquire reported earlier this year, running a trailer at Summer Game Fest’s main show or The Game Awards is inordinately expensive. It costs $250,000 to run a one minute trailer, and an extra $100,000 for every 30 seconds on top of that. Assuming every studio pays that much, every show rakes in millions of dollars, and that’s before taking ticket sales and the cost of the adverts in between the trailers into account.
How much of that money is going towards paying celebrities to overstay their welcome, talking about nothing of importance on stage? How much of that time given to celebrities making us cringe could have been given to developers who were played off stage during their acceptance speeches? The celebrities directly promoting games, like McConaughey, are likely paid by companies who then pay The Game Awards for the screen time, generating more money to pay other celebrities.
The industry is in crisis, layoffs are abundant and brutal, and instead of trying to elevate developers, celebrities are being given absurd amounts of money for publicity stunts. It’s abundantly clear that the whole thing is geared towards spectacle instead of actually being a platform that raises developers up and gives them their time to shine.
The whole thing is less about whether these celebrities are connected to the industry and more about whether these resources could be better used, and they can. Instead of buoying a struggling industry by recognising developers’ efforts to the fullest extent possible, money is going into celebrity pockets in the name of prestige. What a waste.
The Game Awards
Founded by Geoff Keighley, The Game Awards is a video games event centered on celebrating the best of the year’s titles, with emphasis on reveals and promos for upcoming launches.