I'd like to start this with a small disclaimer. I am not going to be very nice to the host of the Game Awards and Summer Games Fest, Geoff Keighley. If anything, I'm going to be a bit of a prick. I'd like to make it very clear up front that I'll do my best to not make it personal or outright vitriolic. The man is already getting a lot of flack, rightly so in my opinon, for how the Game Awards went this year so I'm gonna try not add to that dogpile. However, as the host and creator of what is now the largest gaming event of the year (RIP E3), I believe being critical of such an event and its organizers is valid. Likewise, given the historic year 2023 has been in the games industry for good and bad, there's a lot to discuss about what was said and what wasn't which Geoff undoubtedly has input on. I will not be praising him for his hosting capabilites, is the long and short of it.
As mentioned above, the Game Awards is now the biggest gaming event of the year since the end of E3. Followed swiftly behind it is Summer Games Fest as both shows feature a metric ton of reveals and annoucements for video games, be it new content or new games all together. Personally, some of my fondest gaming memeories have been of massive reveals at the Game Awards, like 2021 with Alan Wake 2 and ARC Raiders or 2022 with Armoured Core VI and Death Stranding 2. However, while Summer Games Fest makes those reveals the forefront and, to be blunt, the entire point of their existance, the Game Awards is a show that is supposed to highlight the best and brightest of the largest entertainment industry in the world and celebrate the work that goes into making games. Over the past year or so, the show's been critisized for focusing too much on advertisements, A-Listers brought in to give the show 'prestige' who cleary don't know whats happneing and a big discrepancy between the time given to award winners and reveals. Most famously, 2022's awards featured a long speech from Best Perfomance Winner Christopher Judge that was heartfelt if a bit long-winded but hey, he's Kratos and God of War is really fucking cool and the man put hours and hours into that performance so let him speak. Come 2023, Neil Newbon, winner of Best Performance for his role as Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3 who previously spoke about quitting acting alltogether before being cast as the vampire spawn, is being cut off as he tried to thank the many survivors of sexual assault for reaching out to him about how they felt seen by his performance. Once the camera cuts to Geoff, he jokingly thanks Neil for keeping his speech short. It was at that point my excitement for the show died a sad, dissapointing death.
I should clarify, who was actually awarded what was all fine by me, I've no problem with any of the award winners. It was an extremely good year of high-quality games and the fact that Alan Wake 2 got its moment in the sun, Potter, coach of EG's Valorant team, got her flowers as she rightly deserves and Baldur's Gate 3 sweeped the awards and I'm happy for all the winners. My biggest problem, as it was for many others, was what happened after the award got annouced. At best, a winner got 30 seconds before a teleprompter started flashing the words 'Please Wrap it Up" at them if they were lucky. If not, they'd simply have music start drowning them out as a clue to get off stage or even not get to go up at all. Some catagories, like the Best Coach of the Year award Potter won, was part of a series of rushed catagories. Geoff would stand in front of the camera as a list of the nominiess stood alongside him, the winner would be called and a new list would appear before Geoff could even finish congratulating the winner. No one would be called up since these sections weren't even done on-stage, it was off to the side of the crowd. This included all the eSports awards, Best in Genre besides Action/Adventure and Best Community Support. That last one, on a seperate note, had Destiny 2 among the nominees. Bungie fired the large majority of their Community Management staff before the nominations were annouced. Yes, I am still extremely pissed off about it.
There's been a few breakdowns of how exactly the Game Awards three-ish hour runtime was split. 18% of it was spent on the awards, around 10 minutes, while 38%, 69 minutes (nice), were taken up by presenters and a whopping 48% or 1 hour and 28 minutes of the Game Awards were reveals and trailers. I think its clear to anyone who watched or with a smidgen of care that the show didn't give a shit about the awards or the winners themselves. It was more concerend with Simu Liu (an actor I'm admitadlly fond of) wasting time talking about how he hurt his foot or Gonzo of the Muppets cutting a tight 5 for his next stand-up gig. The most egrigious example is when Geoff, who had been hyping up Hideo Kojima entering the building earlier that day, allowed Kojima and Jordan Peele to spend 15 minutes on their new game, OD. There was a trailer that looked more like a mocap reel than a video game trailer supposed to intrigue and then an extended interview that came down to nothing more than "Kojima is making a horror game with some Hollywood folk" while Geoff stood to the side on the verge of needing a new pair of slacks. Autear worship is a topic for another day but this level of wasted time for one man when you're rushing people off stage as they thank their coworkers who died during productions as the devs of Baldur's Gate 3 were is, to be blunt, fucking disgusting. I could go further and talk about how insulting it is that Geoff does so little with his platform beyond point at a screen and say "wasn't that neat" and "we had such a great year in video games" as 8000 of his collegues are laid off in an industry rapidly rushing towards monopolies and an extremly public genocide occurs on the other side of the world, of which the Awards own diversity initiative, Future Classes, signed an open letter begging Geoff to address. However, that begins to move in a direction I'm uncomfortable going in without the proper research and preperation. Unlike Geoff, I would like my words to hold some meaning.
E3 ran from 1995 to 2021. A massive expo for the biggest names and brightest stars in the industry to show off their newest creations and mingle with others. It was by no means perfect but its loss was felt as the news of new games trickled out with little fanfare over Twitter and Youtube. The Summer Games Fest did a good job at replacing it, simply stating "here is a platform that will show a bunch of cool shit over the next period of weeks" and sticking with that. The Game Awards is, in all forms and function, a Winter Games Fest disguised as something more. It's a corperate ad reel pretending to thank the workers that make the productss its advertising while rushing them off-stage so it can show the next Fortnite update. If Geoff wants to just point at a screen, say "neat" and hang about with his idols, more power to him. If he wants to be the face and voice for the worst elements of the video game industry, sanitizing their images as they churn and burn more workers so The Last of Us can get another remaster, fine. Please wrap up the charade, though. Stop pretending to care about the people making the games. Go make Winter E3. People will still watch. Hell, I'll still watch. At the very fucking least, just be honest. Let someone with some backbone run the Awards show. Maybe people will start caring more then.
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