The Game Awards nominations were announced yesterday. For GOTY, it’s pretty much agreed that it’s going to be Elden Ring (FromSoft) or God of War Ragnarok (Sony Santa Monica Studios). The later only came out last week, just making it under the wire for when games have to be released to be considered for that year’s awards. Which I’m sure was on purpose.
I’ve been freaking out over this to Ian, and every time, he tells me to CTFD. “Minna. Come on.” That’s usually all he messages, but I can hear the “Don’t be ridiculous!” underneath it. He is reasonable when he points out that GOWR is an exclusive and of limited appeal, anyway.
But. And let me remind you. This happened in 2018 with the first game. Same limitations and it was still accorded GOTY. Ian argued that there was not another clear front runner that year, though Red Dead Redemption 2 came out that year. Still. RDR2 did not have the hype that Elden Ring did. It has sold 46 million copies worldwide, though. RDR2, I mean. Elden Ring has sold 17.5 million copies in less than a year. That’s fucking amazing for them.
Normally, I don’t care about these awards at all. I was pleasantly surprised that Sekiro won in 2019, but I wasn’t expecting it to. And, if I’m going to be painfully honest, it’s my least-favorite of the From games even while I admit the brilliance, so I wasn’t plumping for it. Hell, I don’t stan for games in general. I love From games, yes, but I understand why other people would not like them.
First of all, no game is for everyone. That’s just a fact. Even a game as universally beloved as, say, the Zelda series, may not be for everyone–especially since they only exist on very few platforms. *cough* bullshit exclusivity *cough cough*.
Minecraft (Mojang Studios) has sold nearly 300.000.000 copies. It’s the highest-selling video game of all time. That’s a hell of a lot of copies, but there are nearly 8 billion people in the world. Even if you assume that all those copies sold are independent sales (not), that’s still 1/26th of the world population if my calculator math is correct. That’s a ton of copies, don’t get me wrong, but there are still way more people not playing Minecraft than those who are.