I had intended to post this shortly after The Game Awards had aired, but it had tumbled down my list. So, anyway, I'd watched The Game Awards last year, which I think kept me up until four in the morning - it's not really timed great for us in Europe. It left me with some thoughts afterwards.
Worth mentioning this is more of a rant than anything, so totally fair enough if you want to skip this.
I'm sure the show has always been very announcement centric. I've certainly watched previous events, and vaguely remember it as such, but on this viewing it really felt like the announcements and previews had much more presence than any celebration of the awards themselves.
Maybe I'm just getting a little less excited or interested in the announcements? Maybe it's an age thing?
And to top that off, so many of the games just looked the same to me; guns, shooting things, running around, and the classic scary creepy things, or what have you. There was even a moment when they were showing some new content for Apex Legends, and I initially thought it was for Fortnite because the character designs are starting to really look alike.
Heck, there was a moment where I think there were even several first-person shooters by the same publisher (or developer!?) that were shown back-to-back, and I've no clue what differentiates them from one another. They all looked like GaaS titles to me.
As you can tell, I wasn't very engaged.
When you see awards for some other categories in relation to music etc., just being quickly rushed through like, "and XYZ has won this," only to immediately then move onto the next award, it makes it feel like those have less value than the others; I'd found that incredibly disrespectful.
Yes, I recognise The Game Awards isn't intended to be just a developer focused event. It's trying to appeal to the masses, and thus needs to provide other content to keep people glued, pull in sponsorships to pay towards the whole thing, etc., but it's called The Game Awards for Christ’s sake, and when the awards take a backseat so that the announcements for various new games can be front and centre instead, perhaps it's worth considering a new name?
Like, perhaps, The Grand Capitalist Gaming Advertising Bonanza. More accurate, but that's probably a little too on the nose, heh.
Also, Geoff's weird focus on Hideo Kojima felt as excessive as usual.
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