The Geoff Game Awards show was on recently, and I watched it with interest. Not for the awards because they were mostly a foregone conclusion. Not for the trailers, really, as I wasn’t expecting anything that would interest me. Not for the cringe-inducing banter, either.
You would think that negates any incentive for watching the show for me, but I like to watch it as if it were a train wreck or a car crash. But, also, just to keep a finger on the pulse of the games industry since it’s one that I actually pparticipate in, unlike movies or TV.
The interesting thing to me this year is the robust debate on the categories of The Game Awards, how the votes are cast, and if there needs to be a tweaking of either and/or both. Clair Obscur won a vast majority of awards it was nominated for as was expected.
Full confession: this was not my top game of the year; it wasn’t even in the top ten. Everyone was raving about the story, which I thought was, ah, pedestrian at best. Ok, it was hot trash. I’ve said it many times, and I’ll say it again.
The debate was mainly about whether it should have been not allowed to be nominated for best indie, best debut indie, and game of the year at the same time. Or rather, whether it should have been allowed to win all three (which it did).
Side note: the vote is such that over a hundred outlets worldwide vote in each category. There is no ranking of the votes; no ascertaining that people acutally played the games; and that’s it. In conrast, for the Golden Joysticks, individuals are chosen as judges for each category. They have to play every game in that category. They have a Zoom meeting to debate the entries, and then they vote.
I watched both shows, and I found the latter to be much better than the former. More thoughtful and not just defaulting to the big name. I was watching some guys debate the topic and arguing vociferously that Clair Obscur deserved all the love. Everybody in that company absolutely loved it, and so did most journalists in the industry. Well, one person in this particular company did not love it, but he could acknowledge that it’s a very good game..
However. The one award it did not win was the one that is voted on by the general public for best game of the year (or whatever it’s called). That was won byy Wuthering Waves (Kuro Games), which is a mobile game. It’s a free-to-play Chinese action RPG, and it’s very popular. Then again, anything made by Chinese developers is very popular in part because China hungers for games from Chinese people, and there are over a billion Chinese people in the world.