The Game Awards are a failure

The 2023 Game Awards weren’t, in totality, much different than previous years. However, watching them in real time this year was the visual equivalent of a root canal. Somehow, Geoff Keighley managed to deliver a more tone deaf presentation than the time a mascot with a razor blade was paraded around. That sounds extreme, but I saw it with my own two eyes. The Game Awards have reached a point beyond parody or laughter, now all I want is for them to go away. 

A disaster from the start

The issues with TGA this year reared its head before anyone stepped foot in the Peacock Theatre. Nominations were scrutinized. The Best Indie Game category included Dave the Diver, a game developed by a developer owned by Korea’s largest publisher of games while indies from less represented regions and/or had LGBTQIA + themes got siloed in “Games for Impact.” Content Creator once again conflated reporting and entertainment by putting the great coverage of the industry from People Make Games up against a popular VTuber. Additionally, The Game Awards “Future Class,” created in theory to uplift diverse voices, had a huge amount of its membership sign an open letter calling on the show to advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza during the broadcast, which ultimately fell on deaf ears.

The show itself wasn’t any better once things got going. Per its usual nonsense, TGA began shotgunning out awards during its pre-show, blasting through all five esports related awards in one breath before most had even tuned in. True to form, this continued into the show proper; with the added insult of many presenters coming externally from games. Actors, music producers, and Kojima’s newest director pal all walked across the stage ostensibly in celebration of a field that spent 2023 plagued by wave after wave of layoffs. That disrespect extended towards the winners of awards, who were given 30 seconds each to give acceptance speeches, which is 30 more than many got.

While Keighley isn’t on the record about the why of these things, it’s not hard to speculate: it was to make sure there was room for the ads. Advertising being the true purpose of The Game Awards is not a new observation but even without the booming “World Premiere” voice and graphics, things were particularly egregious. Matthew McConaughey got as much time as he wanted to queue up a trailer and Anthony Mackie took way too long to announce a second season of Twisted Metal. In between all of those was game trailer after game trailer, the lines between ads for the show and normal ads being so blurred it is no longer possible to tell the difference. The only respite came anytime Keighely wandered off to a corner to shotgun out entire waves of awards, the stage proper remaining sacred; reserved only for ads and his friends unless an award could get a big social media bump.

Disrespecting the art

Giving Hideo Kojima nearly ten minutes to do nothing tangible besides get gassed up by yet another famous person while playing off veteran The Legend of Zelda director Eiji Aonuma doesn’t make Kojima’s hijinks endearing – it makes me question what it’s like working at his studio. Trotting out Hollywood faces that have been stunt cast for games does nothing but a disservice to the voice and motion capture actors (often both) who have found some kind of footing performing in this industry. Yeah, Simu Liu is a Starcraft nerd, but he’s en route to household name status. Even the non-celebrity presenters were somehow masturbatory, with many presenters coming from previous winners rather than nominees, much less other figures in the medium. On that note, the aforementioned Future Class was practically non-existent save for a single ad – seemingly in response to the open letter from its membership.

However, what made the awards more putrid this time wasn’t the doubling down of all of TGA’s normal sins. This year’s show was uniquely revealed in the industry’s own bullshit, at the expense of any credibility of the hard work that goes into making games. While workers stood outside advocating for unionization, TGA played a trailer from Chinese studio Game Science  — a studio that not even a month ago was at the center of an IGN exposé on sexism within the developer. Cyberpunk 2077 took “Best Community Support” in spite of various controversies leading up to a game that was so unplayable one platform completely stopped selling it; to say nothing of the transphobic marketing of the game that made it very clear who CD Projekt Red sees as its “community.” What broke me though was when Hello Games’ Sean Murray walked on stage following a trailer highlighting how much work had to go into getting his studio’s No Man’s Sky into the shape he said in repeated interviews the game always was in. Murray, spurred on by Keighley’s desperation for crowd engagement, began to repeat his own catastrophic mistakes, making ambitious claims that last time led to literal threats against his staff and himself when they weren’t fulfilled; mistakes that he himself realized probably weren’t good to make later that night. 

The Game Awards exist only for ego

That’s fine for Keighley though. Should Light No Fire fail to deliver on the lofty expectations Keighley coaxed out of Murray, it just means he doesn’t have to find a corner of the Peacock Theatre to quickly say the game’s name before cutting to another trailer. That’s the thing about The Game Awards that’s become even more clear after this year’s show: none of the actual video games matters to them. The awards themselves are an afterthought to even the man behind them, much less the publishers who will gladly take the statues and toss out the people who earned them. Keighley has claimed before that the announcements are necessary to even put on the show but the way he needled Sean Murray or Capcom’s Ryozo Tsujimoto for anything that could elicit a cheer from the fawning audience, the way he chokes up thinking about Kojima, his little flexes about getting to playtest and preview all these games, it’s clear as day now that Keighley was always only ever about the attention. He has to be the guy, the one with the hook ups and connections, the one who’s uncle worked at Nintendo. His obsession with access has tainted whatever vision he could have had to honor video games and turned The Game Awards into its own self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course the only way the show can succeed is with the reveals, it’s what he trained the audience to expect. 

As such, The Game Awards are an abject failure as a means to honor gaming. Instead they are just another diseased boil on the skin of a medium that is increasingly becoming all boils. Where video games could be set apart from comparative mediums by truly honoring the workers doing the job in its awards shows, The Game Awards chooses to make the Grammys and Oscars look reasonable in their excess. It’s an embarrassment to anyone who has ever enjoyed a video game and it’s time to put the pretense to rest. If the awards don’t matter, we shouldn’t continue watching. They put the trailers on YouTube right after anyway. 

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Image screenshot © 2023, The Game Awards