The game’s prizes are losing their luster

It’s gaming awards season. That special time of year when we come together to celebrate video games and the people who make them… by watching expensive commercials briefly interspersed with the odd awards speech or musical performance. For better or worse, The Game Awards is the biggest night on the video game events calendar. But with the way things have been going, things have recently been “worse” than they used to be “better.”

Between video game project host and hype man Geoff Keighley, The Game Awards is older and ostensibly more mature than Summer Games Festival. It was designed in 2014 as a way to Celebrate the people who make and play games, The show has always been part awards ceremony, part commercial product. This idea has been implemented with varying degrees of success. (to remember Send Hydrobot?) But in the last few years, it seemed as if the awards part was increasingly getting in the way of the business part.

This feeling was more intense During the 2023 Game Awards. Developers accepting statues were often drowned out by music or interrupted by prompters asking them to “please finish it” after about 30 seconds of their allotted time. puppets and Stranded death However, director Hideo Kojima had no such time limits imposed on them Consequences Calculate that 13 acceptance letter It would have been appropriate during the five minutes it took Kojima to explain himself Game / Not a game to.

2023 was also the first full year of the now endemic pandemic The labor crisis in video games This led to developers being laid off by the tens of thousands while popular game studios were shut down. That year’s Game Awards went unrecognized, angering developers even more. “I am extremely disappointed in Geoff Keighley for his silence on the state of the industry this year,” said Dillon Somerville, senior environmental artist at Monomi Park. Edge In 2023.

Kelly, perhaps in response to the bad optics, He acknowledged that the labor issue will continue in 2024. The Game Awards also introduced a new category, Game Changer, with its inaugural award going to Amir Satvat, a business development manager at Tencent who created a resource to help laid-off developers find jobs.

But in the months following the 2024 awards, Kelly was again accused of mistreating the people he was supposed to be celebrating. In 2020, The Game Awards It announced a new initiative called the Future Classdesigned to celebrate game makers “who represent the bright, bold, and inclusive future of video games.” Recruits are recognized during the broadcast and provided with networking opportunities, mentorship programs, and other resources throughout the following year. However, it was there Reports Claiming that Kelly has The concerns of the future class were ignored and that the program’s resources were financially unavailable.

In 2023, the Future Class wrote an open letter to The Game Awards and Keighley calling for recognition of the war in Gaza. This was not without precedent. In 2022, the award ceremony recognized the war in Ukraine. But Kelly didn’t respond to the message, and he didn’t mention the future class much either. The Game Awards have not named a Future category in the past two years and will no longer be named according to Future category organizer Emily Weir. “At this time, we are not planning a new Future Class for this year and do not have any active programming plans for the Future Class,” she said. In a statement to Game developer.

Like many programs focused on diversity and inclusion, Class of the Future began in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020. But with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) becoming publicly taboo in the rise of the Trump administration and Right online, a lot Companies, Including game publishershave reduced or abandoned their DEI programs. While there’s no clear reason for Future Class’s virtual shutdown, The Game Awards seems to be doing what it always does — whatever’s popular at the time.

As much as The Game Awards has lost its veneer of respectability among some of the people whose work it’s supposed to celebrate, rest assured, it’s not going anywhere. The Game Awards are broadcast to millions of viewers With a record 154 million live streams in 2024. That’s a lot of eyeballs for that Developers pay a lot of money to access the interface. Even for those who don’t buy airtime, showing off your game during a presentation can result in a significant boost in sales. after Balatro It was nominated for and won several awards last year, including Best Independent Debut Film, from its publisher PlayStack Awards shouted specifically For his contribution to a significant increase in the number of players.

More generally, the awards also provide a nice focal point for disparate online gaming communities to gather around… and talk about. E3 is long goneand other major events (It’s not run by Kelly either) are the publisher’s live broadcasts. With everything broken now, you shout to your friends or colleagues about how to do it Hades I got robbed for game of the year (an event I would do never Transcend) is fun and something TGAs are uniquely suited to offer. not so Oscars Gaming Awards — DICE, the BAFTAs, and the International Game Development Awards (IGDA) take good care of that. But if you want popularity and production values ​​and Flute manthere’s nothing like The Game Awards — although some of the shine is starting to wear off.