The problem with The Game Awards

The Game Awards is on borrowed time until the wrinkles are ironed out

For five years the video game industry has laid claim to its own awards ceremony, handing out accolades to the people whose calling it is to entertain us consumers.

But something festers deep in the bowels of The Game Awards and if it’s not addressed soon the entire show is destined to be forever ridiculed.

The Jury

The jury are the gatekeepers who decide which game developer team can enter the forbidden kingdom of adoration and which are destined to the bargain bin with a “happy to be nominated” sticker adorning their game case. It’s the single most important part of any awards ceremony, get it wrong and you’re aksing for trouble.

Journalists.

Ask any gamer worth his salt who the least qualified people imaginable are to judge a years’ worth of video game releases and the answer, unsurprisingly, will be “journalists”. Yet in 2019, The Game Awards jury was dominated by media organisations.

It’s important to make a distinction between an independent video game news and review website — usually created by a team of buddies with no money and often no training or real idea of what they’re doing — and multi-million dollar, global media organisations. The latter make their millions selling ads on their websites and any one of those companies that cover video games would’ve unquestionably served an ad for any number of video game publishers.

People who don’t like or play games are deciding which games are the best.

Media organisations know that when an advertising client wins an award like “Game of the Year”, it’s likely that client will want to buy some ads. Armed with that knowledge, a company can reach out ahead of time and find the highest bidder. And who would notice if the highest bidder also happened to win the award?

Viral videos of “professional game reviewers” getting stick on tutorial levels, reviews that slam games for not having features that turn out to be unlocked at higher difficulty levels and who can forget the famous advise against a game for having “too much water”? These are all symptoms of people who don’t give a damn trying to convince a population of fans that their own opinion is gospel.

The selection media organisations are questionable. Who uses The Guardian to get their gaming news? Why does Vox media have 2 properties on the jury? What’s The Hollywood Reporter doing there? At least they report on the industry, unlike the LA Times whose only reference to “games” is a “Crosswords” section on their website. There’s also a Japanese publication dedicated to FPS games. Any wonder what games they’re voting for? And who even knows how many of these jury members are affiliated with the Disney monopoly.

Perhaps with 5 years and dozens of winners, it’s time to give jury control to the previous winners. These developers know what makes a game good and have technical insight that no journalist can muster.

The Advisory Board

The Game Awards website tells us the Advisory Board — which is made up of the heads of large publishers and companies such as Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, EA and AMD — is there to guide the strategic direction of The Game Awards.

In March 2019, Phil Harrison was added to the board. An industry veteren, Harrison has been an execuitive at both Sony and Microsoft but it wasn’t until his appointment to the head of Google Stadia did he enter The Game Awards advisory board.

Stadia is a game streaming service that launched a couple of weeks prior to The Game Awards 2019 and featured very heavily during the ceremony’s ad breaks.

Phil Spencer, Executive Vice President at Microsoft also sits on the Board and unsurprisingly the new Xbox Series X — Micorsoft’s next console — was exclusively revealed at The Game Awards.

Stadia has been branded a “flop” by gamers, but featured heavily at The Game Awards after Stadia Vice President Phil Harrison was appointed to the Advisory Board.

Sony Interactive Entertainment is also listed as a “board member”, as is Rockstar Games and Valve. How do these entire companies influence the strategic direction of the awards ceremony?

Could the Advisory Board, perhaps, be “Advertising Partners” instead? That seems more likely and if true, isn’t a problem. The problem lies in taking the gaming fanbase for fools. The members of the Board are presented as giving the awards show their “seal of approval”. Don’t worry gamers, you can take this show seriously because your favourite publishers helped make it!

That statement would still be true if they were positioned as “Advertising Partners”, it would just give the audience proper context.

Get the stakeholders right

Video game developers deserve to have an awards ceremony, they deserve to be awarded for doing an outstanding job. But fans of those games and the industry also deserve to be treated fairly and not have media and advertisement companies sneaking messages into their conciousness.

This kind of activity only erodes the industry. There are values to be upheld, even if they’re centered around spending as much money as posisble. The video game industry was founded with the idea of making technological advances in computers and video capabilities fun for everyone.

The very least The Game Awards can do is remember the people who make this industry what it is: the gamers and the developers. These two groups should have more say over how the awards are decided before the show turns into an infomercial for media and advertising companies.