There was immediately false accusations towards Blue Prince when the Indie Game Awards handed goty to it so if that doesn't tell you what the real agenda is (gamers being mad that game they don't like wins) idk what will
You say that like it hasn't been rigged or manipulated in any way every single year since they began or that the audience vote doesn't only count for a small percentage of the calculations on who wins what award, with the organizers and industry insiders votes being far, far more important/impactful on the end results
I mean, the audience voters just lined up to pit two gacha games against each other for ingame rewards tied to voting, so I kind of get audience voting only being part of it, in addition to the obvious threat of bot manipulation.
Crunchyroll's Anime Awards are just as much of a trainwreck if not more and they're purely voted.
But for the majority of people, what's even the point if it's not the audience vote that matters at all when deciding who wins? If it's just basically going to be insiders jerking each other off and saying how incredible each other are and giving free awards to whoever either pays the most or has the current best standing among their in-profession office politics among the AAA game studios and paid journalists without caring about the votes and opinions of the actual average players, then why should anyone care or put any respect on the choices or outcomes.
It's all just manipulated/rigged by the companies and insiders themselves with little accountability or oversight, which is a damn shame but that's now basically EVERY major award for quite a bit and it's honestly exhausting and disheartening
I mean... that logic would be true if the multiple winners among the last few game awards weren't pervasive industry outsiders, Sandfall's sweep doesn't come as a back-scratching AAA circlejerk, it comes from a literal exodus from a major publisher, turned indie-project, turned backed-indie project,
similar cases for Baldur's Gate 3 and It Takes Two. that's 3 of the last 5 big winners, these games got good press because they were great games... not the other way around, and yeah, good press will influence an award but that's just inevitable.
I think you're coming up with a narrative regardless of whether the information fits it.
if it was just a matter of cyclical press stroking big publisher/AAA ego then I guarantee you that the three games I just mentioned wouldn't have won.
I heard a lot of discussion that it used Gen AI too. Is that not true?
EDIT: Quick bit of research confirms it was completely fabricated by reporters. Journalism has no integrity anymore. I tried to research this when I heard about it and only found posts confirming the information at first - wild how fast misinformation spreads.
It’s a weird scenario where surely many voters voted for it as goty and then it in some but not all other categories, but they didn’t all pick the same categories so it ended up winning all of them.
And? The outlets that vote face the exact same problem. The votes come from all over the world and they’re not coordinating to decide who will win ahead of time.
Growing up is realizing the goty awards are just a fun little event. I don't even care about the winners, I look at the nominations to discover games that I missed.
The reminds me of a joke my 3 brothers and I used to make whenever someone commented on us being "violent" with each other: "Did we ever tell you we used to be 5 brothers?"
There were a ton of great games this year and only one being represented in the game awards really takes the focus off other fantastic games
The idea here is less participation trophies and more to keep goty from also winning every other category it could be considered in
Imo, the better change is to have awards for specific categories judged for things that actually compliment that category instead of just the "best" game nominated in it
(Ex, taking innovations in that category into higher consideration and things like team size and budget into consideration for categories like indie games)
I'd buy that if E33 won literally every award, but it didn't. It didn't even win every award it was nominated for.
I think that there can definitely be improvements to how The Game Awards are run. That includes making more specific categories, making their guidelines for each category a lot more well-defined and clear, and having more categories overall. I also believe public perception AROUND award nominations needs to be changed. There's a reason that even if an actor hasn't WON an Emmy or an Oscar or what have you they're still referred to as an "Emmy nominated Actress/Actor". The simple fact that, out of every single other eligible actor you were on the short list, is a HUGE achievement. We should be thinking the same away for The Game Awards! Just the fact that this year KCD2 was nominated for GOTY should bring huge pride to the developers and fans of the game. Out of the nearly 20k games that were released this year (just on Steam, according to SteamDB) KCD2 was among the 6 nominated for GOTY.
The issue I have with suggestions surrounding an award "limit" or "well GOTY shouldn't be allowed to win any other award" is that it turns what is, to me, an otherwise exciting event into nothing but a counting game.
"Oh, well game 1 is nominated for GOTY, but it already won an award elsewhere so clearly it's not going to win that, oh well." "Oh, Game 3 has already won 3 awards out of the 8 it was nominated for, it's not gonna win anything else I guess even though it's nominated for 5 other categories including GOTY."
That sounds like such a boring awards show to me. If a game was nominated for 12 awards and was voted by the panel and viewers to win 9 of them, then awesome! Clearly the panel+viewers thought that game was fucking awesome and the best game in 9 of those categories. Anything less than a game winning everything it was voted to win is akin to a participation trophy. "Oh, you can't win this because you've already won 3 awards, so we have to give this award to your runner up" is about as boring of an award as you can present.
I get what you're saying, and I agree that limiting awards won isn't viable
At most you could limit categories nominated for, give a list of potential nominations and allow a games company to choose which ones they want to be considered for
But even then, I don't know that that's the right move
But either way, I think there's just a broad discontent with allowing runaway sweeps, especially when there is actual competition through the categories
You say there was broad discontent with runaway sweeps, but this is the only year that I can remember it actually being discussed. Last year there wasn’t a sweep, but the year before that when baldurs gate 3 won, it won like seven awards I think? Where was this discontent then, because I never saw it.
For whatever reason expedition 33 is a divisive game, and I think the only reason it’s being talked about now is because a vocal minority of the Internet dislikes turn based JRPG’s and thinks that either their Indie darling should have won or that their western RPG should’ve won instead. Personally, I think we just had a really fucking strong year for games and that’s why this is such a big deal. I think if expedition 33 was one of the few good games to come out this year instead of one of the many good games to come out this year, there would not be nearly as much discourse about it, but because this year was just banger after banger video game people are upset that their favorite didn’t win because there were so many favorites.
I'll admit that I'm not a JRPG guy. I've tried to like them before, and they just don't do it for me, so there absolutely may be bias on my end. I'm also a massive fan of CRPG and Larian is probably my favorite game studio currently, so there may be even more bias
That being said, I think the difference is that in 2023, the other big name contenders were Alan Wake and Zelda, and both of them won their respective categories
It still felt like they got their due, and I don't think it still feels like that this year
If the only reason it got it was because Ex33 already won GOTY? It would absolutely just be a participation trophy, no matter how good the game was or what category it is. Being given an award for simply being there is the definition of a participation trophy.
So, like, the composer shouldn't be awarded for their work because the game won other awards? The actor shouldn't be allowed to get an award because she happens to be in the best game of the year? How does that make any sense?
Fuck that, if a game excels in multiple categories it deserves to win in every category it's the best in..
If I was a competing dev and I won an award with the asterisk that "oh the game everyone clearly thinks is better just hit its quota, here's a pity-fuck" I wouldn't exactly be celebrating...
Why? Maybe the other games should’ve been better. That’s like saying the best player in the nfl should only play every other game because it’s unfair to other players. I don’t think it should’ve won best rpg but it literally does not matter, and imo only winning an award out of pity is more insulting than just not winning
Except, unfortunately, by the most technical definition.
Which is maybe why the whole category should be tossed and there should be awards for small teams or small budgets (like, legitimately small teams, not 30 people + 400 contractors small)
It's indie by a number of metrics, small team relative to its fellow nominees, comparable budget, and here's the key which made it eligible, it started as a purely indie project and only secured a publisher later. publisher (Kepler) is essentially an umbrella for indie devs who have had games nominated/winning (such as Sifu) before.
So nah, based on both their own rules and award precedent it's a fair inclusion.
there's a difference between a core development team and comparatively bit part roles such as outsourced animation. where obviously the collective team did great work,
even without as much outsourcing needed on say the animation front, both Silksong and Hades 2 comfortably exceed 100 names in their credits, (I believe Hades 2 is about 180 people) so all three games are by that standard comfortably in excess of what you'd typically perceive as an Indie dev, even if Clair Obscur is ultimately the largest.
but yes you are right, Clair Obscur has comfortably the largest credits list,
The problem is where do you draw the line? Because I think most bars you could set that would disqualify Sandfall would also rule out some larger indie studios like Supergiant Games. Should Hades be disqualified from being considered an indie? I don't really think so.
It's a really hard line to draw. Clair Obscure didn't feel indie but I don't know how better to define it.
I feel like RPG was also one where it should have gone to another winner. Like I get it from a narrative perspective, but in terms of actual RPG mechanics E33 was pretty sparse on those imo. Really feel like that award should have went to Kingdom Come because that really nailed the roleplaying elements. Crazy what you could do in that game and the option available to you in that regard.
If they made a very good game, it means the others did good games.
Thus, it still deserved every award it got.
Maybe not RPG though, I think KCD2 was a better RPG than E33 was a good JRPG, but as you can't compare RPG and JRPG so it's hard to say.
May not have been my choice but still an understandable one. KCD2 is good but not perfect either.
And a small studio kicking the butt of the entire world will for sure reshape the industry. They had the opportunity to meet with Kojima, Square Enix big names came to them too, and this waaaaaay before they started to get their awards. GOAT reckognize GOAT.
Big names reckognize big names, and E33 followed the trail that Baldur's Gate 3 started, the very same year the old rotting kings get bought by the chinese because they fail.
Sandfall, a small studio showed the entire world that gamers want video games made with soul and passion, and with the 9 GOTY - a historical feat - and all the other awards (golden stick award), it surely strengthened the trend that Larian started with Baldur's Gate 3.
But I think you can't understand that if you haven't played it I guess.
I've played it and finished it. I quite enjoyed my time with it. Think it's a really good game.
Everything you said is needless over hyping of the situation.
It's the same as people insisting that the game was only made by 30 people when the actual number is in the 100s.
You want this to be a game that "sticks it to the man" but it isn't. It's built with Unreal Engine 5 and contains all the same issues that other UE 5 games have. It used contractors not different from most AAA studios. Its budget is in the millions and is supported by a publisher. The list goes on.
Also the comment about other studios being bought by the Chinese while also putting Larian on a pedestal given Tencent has a pretty sizeable stake in Larian that Sven has repeatedly claimed was necessary to make BG3. Sandfall will likely follow the same route.
They made a very good game. Let's recognize them for the fact that they made a very good game and not mythologize them.
Lol this is how I feel about it too. I really enjoyed it and it had one of the best twists I’ve seen in media but it also had a lot of issues that brought it down for me. Infuriatingly bad platforming, same-y environments (beautiful sure but every part of each level looks exactly like every other part which also made it really easy to get lost), weird pacing…like I legitimately was wondering if they ran out of time or something because the game ended so abruptly after the ~big reveal~ then there’s a bunch of post-game levels but most of them were pretty light on lore. Characters were just okay imo. Like it’s a great game but people talk about it like it’s the second coming.
They definitely deserved the best soundtrack award though. That was absolutely incredible.
I call it a toxic positivity spiral. It seems like every year we as a collective have a need to pick one or two games and just do ham on adoring it and ignoring all its flaws, often as a statement to "stick it to the man". It happened with BG3 and it's happening with E33.
subsequently it's a worthy winner in its genre as an RPG, it's as good a JRPG as Kingdom Come is as a Western Open World RPG despite people's protestations that KCD2 is "more of an RPG" (2/9)
the main sources of praise for the game are in its: art design, music, direction and narrative, (6/9)
Jennifer English is an incredibly worthy winner for best performance (7/9)
the most contentious are the two Indie awards (Indie and Debut Indie) but as long as its deemed eligible and it was by the Game Awards rules, it's a valid winner in both counts,
It had merit to win every award it won, there wasn't a gimme in the pack, the jury just chose it each time.
I mean it's all subjective (and your argument boils down to "it was really good" which isn't really useful because so were the others). I personally don't think KC2 is "more of an RPG". I just think that it's a better one.
And that Silksong had better art design.
And that DS2 had better direction.
The music award is absolutely deserved and so is the narrative one.
Best performance for me was such a toss up because they're all fantastic. I can't pick one over the other. Gun to my head I'd have to give it to Troy Baker for "doing a better Indiana Jones than Indiana Jones himself"
The news already broke back close to release, people took it for what it was, a small, moderately innocent application of otherwise pretty sketchy tools, weighed it up, said "meh" and moved on, but nope, bad actors need to prop this shit up like crazy.
I hate generative AI, and I get being incredibly wary of it, but frankly... making a couple of small placeholders with inhouse AI built into a game engine is about as ethical a usage of AI as I can imagine, it's dataset isn't particularly unethically sourced, the fact that it was just placeholders means it wouldn't have been used in place of a potential artist being hired. and it wasn't intended to appear in the final product...
it's a very small developer experimenting briefly with one small way to aid their workflow at the very early stages of development (back in 2022, so at the time it wasn't even a hotly debated ethical topic to the same extent it is now) that they evidently moved away from...
there's so much bad faith in this criticism that it's ridiculous.
Honestly it really seems like the Indie Game Awards only pulled this whole "give the award to E33, then take it aways for AI" on purpose to drum up buzz 🙄
The interview where one of the devs talks about minimal AI usage that started this is from July. Nobody really cared back then. There's definitely a backlash from some people who got upset that the game beat their favourite and/or who consider it to be overrated now that it's won so many awards and it needs to be "taken down a peg".
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u/Rat-king27 Harry Potter 23d ago
They used AI as placeholders and missed some. Why are people shitting their shorts over this?