A Closer Look at The Game Awards 2022
On Monday November the 14th 2022 the nominees for Geoff Keighley’s annual video game award show The Game Awards were announced alongside the ability to allow viewers the chance to vote for their favorite picks in several different categories ranging from Best Game by Genre, all the way up to the titular Game of The Year.
The Game Awards first debuted in 2014 with a viewer count of 1.9 million, and the show has skyrocketed in ratings over the years with last year’s show bringing in a staggering 85 million viewers. The award show is commonly criticized for being more of a glorified commercial to show off upcoming games announcements rather than a proper awards ceremony. But some might argue that you wouldn’t get these kinds of numbers without the emphasis on trailers and world premieres.
Today I wanted to go over a few observations about this year’s nominees and how it relates to previous years, as well as point out some interesting inclusions as well as exclusions or “snubs” as the case may be.
For starters, one of the biggest pieces of news out of the nominees' reveal is that Nintendo and Monolith Soft’s Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is one of the six contenders for the top game of the year honors this year. This is noteworthy for many people because The Game Awards have a tendency to ignore games like Xenoblade 3. That being Japanese RPGs that sometimes have a more niche audience owing to their anime aesthetic and narratives.
Keighley was even seen on Twitter posting a screenshot in which two different Twitter users answered a tweet asking viewers what they thought the biggest “snub” of the show would be by answering with Xenoblade 3. Also a quick glance online would show you that several video game news outlets were also caught off guard by this inclusion.
It’s a very cool change of pace for the award show. And as Keighley has mentioned many times in the past the nominees are selected by a panel of upwards of 100 judges from various outlets and influencers. But some have to wonder if Keighley himself does not ultimately have a little more sway than he would have you believe when it comes to the proceedings.
Another interesting thing to note from across the various categories for The Game Awards fan voting is that there are several indie hits from this year that seemingly didn’t make as much of an impression as one might think.
Chiefly among them is the breakout success Vampire Survivors. A game that by all accounts took PC gamers by storm this year to the point that it has created an entirely new genre of auto-shooter type games. It has even been suggested that Vampire Survivors might be the most popular game that owners of Valve’s portable PC the Steam Deck despite the fact that it is a very graphically simplistic game.
There was a theory on Twitter that perhaps Vampire Survivors has yet to achieve as much broad appeal as one might think, and as a result a majority of the judges who came up with the nominees for The Game Awards might not have even heard of the game yet. Somehow. Surprisingly.
On Twitter Keighley shared an image showing the number of times certain games received a game of the year nomination from judges, and among the selected six, three of them were more popular than the rest.
God of War Ragnarok received 10 nominations, with both Elden Ring and Horizon Forbidden West tying with 7 each. One could argue that the “vibe” going into game of the year awards this year is that Elden Ring could, and possibly should win at most outlets, we do see that the recently released God of War Ragnarok has proven more popular in this scenario at least. But perhaps that is to be expected for one of Sony’s Prestige first party games among a mainstream panel of judges.
Also worth noting that Call of Duty Modern Warfare II (2022) somehow got 3 nominations for game of the year, so one might also argue that some of these judges are out of touch. But what can you do?
Finally, there’s usually a certain section of The Game Awards that a majority of viewers cannot possibly be bothered to care about and that is the ridiculious number of awards dedicated to eSports and “content creators”.
The reason that this is noteworthy this year is because among the nominees for content creators is ex-Twitter user Nibellion, or “Nibel” who recently retired from Twitter largely in part due to the current era of Elon Musk stink that has threatened to destory the platform. It was heartening to see him included in this, and even more so to see so many people in the gaming community earnestly get behind the nomination. So if nothing else, that’s a very cool move by The Game Awards committee.
