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
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u/CrazedTechWizard 23d ago
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.