There's One Big Problem With The Game Awards Nominations

The Game Awards

Every year this happens, and every year, nothing really changes. But Kotaku’s Ethan Gach just laid out the solution to the eternal Game Awards problem. If you’re nominated for Game of the Year, you should not be able to be nominated for the other genre categories.

Why? Because unlike the Oscars, which does not have Best Horror Movie or Best Action Blockbuster or Best Biopic categories, The Game Awards has a slate of genre awards that overlap with the picks for Game of the Year.

But that creates an obvious problem. If a GOTY nominee is in a list for a genre, and none of the other games are, it automatically has to win or it simply doesn’t make sense. Or if multiple GOTY nominees are in one category and one wins, then it’s obvious the other two are clearly not going to win GOTY well before that final category is announced.

It’s easy to use this year as an example, but this happens every year. So for instance, Best RPG. The nominees are:

Will Final Fantasy XVI get that win to make up for no GOTY nomination? Will Starfield win the only award it’s nominated for? No, of course not. Not just because Baldur’s Gate 3 is better, but because it’s a GOTY nominee in the first place, there’s no point pretending it wouldn’t win this category. If another game here was better, it would have a GOTY slot.

It’s probably even worse in the Best Action Adventure category which has four of the six GOTY nominees in there by itself. So if say, Alan Wake 2 wins here, then there’s little point being on pins and needles to see if Spider-Man 2, Resident Evil 4 or Tears of the Kingdom win GOTY. By the end of the show it will literally just be down to Alan Wake 2, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Super Mario Wonder as viable options.

Gach’s stated solution of not allowing GOTY nominees to be in these categories kills two birds. It removes this element from the equation and it will be a genuine mystery which games win these categories or GOTY itself. Second, it allows other games to be featured especially in a massive year like this one.

The counterpoint is that it gets sort of screwed up because you can then say were you really the Best RPG in a year when Baldur’s Gate 3 came out, or are you just Best RPG In 2023 Besides Baldur’s Gate 3? But the other option is doing away with the genre categories altogether which means an even smaller slate. Still, I think the proposed solution fixes more problems than it creates. So far, Geoff Keighley does not agree.

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