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The Game Awards nominees 2024: Controversially, DLCs/expansions can now compete for GOTY
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- Title
- Here Are Your 2024 GOTY Nominees For Geoff Keighley's 10th Annual Game Awards
- Published
- Nov 18 2024
- Word count
- 363 words
There's been a bit of a stir online due to the decision to allow expansions/DLCs to compete and possibly win GOTY, starting this year with Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree. One of the big talking points I've heard is that Elden Ring already won GOTY, so this takes attention away from other games. But what if there was a large expansion for a game that hasn't won GOTY yet, would that be ok? Game fans of Tildes, what do you think?
Awards are marketing. They're launched and survive because of that. Most of the "big awards" people like to hold up as inviolate standards of "greatness" are some very small group of people, often corporate backed, that "award" those accolades.
It's not surprising AAA publishers want more bites at the apple. The pushback is for consumers to disengage from the awards. Arguing over the awards themselves just proves "relevance", that the awards will have some kind of impact that could affect sales.
Yes, exactly. Awards that involve big corporations are almost always corrupt, won by whoever managed to bribe the judges the best. The Game Awards in particular seems to be the most vapid of the bunch in my personal opinion. The best game award in particular just seems to be a competition of who spent the most money on the game rather than how good the game actually is. Though, to be fair, this kind of category is always going to be very subjective.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that anyone is being bribed. For one, it’s illegal under FTC rules. Do you really think Larian is out there bribing judges? For an award, that like you said, doesn’t really matter?
Bribe is a strong word, but I don’t think it’s wrong to use it. “For your consideration campaigns” are a well known phenomenon and they are completely legal.
The awards don’t actually matter except they are an effective marketing tool, so it makes sense for publishers to spend money on making sure they win.
The difference is that there isn’t a quid pro quo between the judges and the money; the money is just being used in an attempt to have mindspace.
But we also know this doesn’t happen for the game awards. For your consideration ads are public, you see them all the time, especially if you’re in LA in the run up to the Oscar’s. No such records exist for the game awards. Oscar’s matter much more than the game awards.
Additionally, the latter is really made possible by the centrality of Hollywood to the film industry, which doesn’t exist for games.
In any case I don’t see any reason to think that anyone is buying votes. The game with the biggest budget or company behind it is seldom the winner. Larian is a mid-sized company that would be traditionally described as an AA developer before BG3. They self publish.
I think there's stuff being released as DLC now that honestly would have been a sequel in the past. Nowadays sequels are more and more reserved for big system updates, and not just "a new story in the same game" as some past sequels were.
Like I think shadow of the erdtree or Phantom Liberty have as much right to be nominated as COD N+1 or Persona 5 Royal, even if they're not sold in the same "form factor".
I think DLC should be its own thing at this point. All it does is outshine games who deserve a moment in the spotlight, even just as a nominee.
Yeah, why not have a separate category for "best DLC/expansion"? That makes more sense to me.
It’s ultimately arbitrary what comes out as a game and what comes out as dlc. Does it particularly make sense that persona 5 royale is a distinct game from persona 5 but shadow of the erdtree isn’t?
That talking point would have merit if everyone was talking about DLC the size of, ohh let's say, Starfield, but Shadow of the Erdtree could nearly standalone as a game itself.
It sets a dangerous precedent, but SOTE could be rewarded for delivering on a DLC and then some.
I'd argue that exceptions should remain exceptions though. DLC shouldn't be automatically in the running unless it's a sizeable release.
Ultimately, you need rules when voting behavior is broken. But in this case, I don’t think that’ll be the case - a random dlc for a game won’t be getting the nomination over real games that came out. There’s only like 5 nominees, it’s not easy to be on that list.
Erdtree feels like the minimum you need to be nominated, and imo erdtree will not win or get particularly close to winning.
A nomination is already incredible praise. The fact the rules were bent to facilitate a DLC should be an incredible win for FromSoft.
I agree in principle, something new should take the crown, and I'll probably not vote for SotE. But I'll be lying if it wasn't a very strong contender. If anything, if they do take the win, I just hope other studios see that a chunky DLC gets the bag and that it'll reduce low effort DLC releases that plague the industry.
I prefer it actually IF the DLC actually does something interesting beyond the base game. I haven't played Erdtree so I don't know if it meets that criteria but I'm guessing it doesn't?
Reward risks, execution and creativity.
Anyway yeah I'm for it but Game Awards seem to serve the popular games more than the interesting ones so it's not really an award that I care about one way or another.
It's pretty big. The latest season of Bingo Brawlers online tournament is taking place exclusively within the Erdtree DLC. I wouldn't say it's revolutionary with regard to the base game, but there are certainly entire games which have been released with less scope than this.
In that case I can see it. Scope and quality that is giving people their money's worth should be rewarded.
I can see a time past when modern large world expanding DLCs could be their own games. I think the DLC price vs base game price reflects the difference in scope, and all the quality is certainly there.
That said, I don't personally think GOTY should be available to an expansion, but maybe I'm just some old fuddy duddy who remembers playing the original space invaders in arcades, and thinks these new fangled downloads should just get off my lawn.
Make a DLCOTY category, or something, and compete for that, would be my vote
I guess it depends if you think DLC needs the incentive to be better. Goty category does that.
Personally this has been a pretty lackluster year (I can't believe FF7 Rebirth got nominated) so I see room for competition anyway.
All of the Final Fantasy XIV expansions are straight up better than the original release, and have had excellent stories. The latest, Dawntrail, isn't quite at the same heights that Shadowbringers and Endwalker reached, but it was certainly good and I think it should be eligible for something like that. The expansions are all basically equivalent to a full single player game in terms of scope.
TGA has never been consistent and like every other award show is more of a popularity context than a proper celebration in media. So "care" sort of went out my window like the Emmy's/Grammy's/Oscar's. Which I suppose is good for Geoff becsuse that's exactly what he wants TGA to be.
Holistically: we had "ongoing games" and that's where I see Expansions going. Assuming that Geoff always goes over and doesn't simply want to make "best expansion/DLC" award. That's typically where the big mobile games and WOW/FF14 expansions go.
Why not just have a separate category for best DLC/Re-release? That would solve the problem easily. Then new games don't have to compete with previous winners but those who worked on the DLC/remakes (which are sometimes just as much work as the original game) can have a shot at an award too?
The overall GOTY award is ultimately the most prestigious and the one that matters the most.
Nominees are here, btw:
https://www.thegameawards.com/nominees/game-of-the-year
Personal insights:
Everyone is talking about Elden Ring getting the repeat, but if anyone can dethrone it, it's probably
BalatroAstro Bot. Why would Astro Bot have the edge over Mario Wonder losing to Elden Ring from last year? I'm going to assume DLC controversy is going to be a thing, and while Mario Wonder is a distillation of Mario 2d platforming plus gimmick, Astro Bot is a 3d platformer. We haven't seen a good one for a long time, and never one this good.Black Myth's most noticable thing about it was the streaming rules, and hell would freeze before weeb trash would be allowed in the prestigious section of the advertisement clownfiesta, let alone sequels and spiritual successors.
Just a small correction, elden ring didn't compete last year, it came out in 2022. Baldur's Gate 3 was GOTY 2023.
I think in the past something like Phantom Liberty or Shadow of the Erdtree would have been classified as expansions like StarCraft Brood War. We just call it all DLC now whether it's a 5$ cosmetic skin or a 50hr expansion to the game.
That being said, I think DLCs that are more like expansions with a full story and substantial content with sufficient scope should definitely be allowed to be nominated for GOTY.
Nominating a (good) expansion for GotY is a choice for sure. They've already got awards for "community support" and "ongoing", which really should be covering DLC already, but whatever.
The most offensive nominations to me are Multiversus for fighting game of the year, and Arcane for best adaptation.
Multiversus already won fighting game of the year two years ago for its early access release. It getting nominated for its full release, which has greatly underperformed, is an absolute joke. There were other games that easily could have been nominated instead.
Arcane is ridiculous in the opposite direction. Instead of being something old, it's something that's not even (fully) out yet. It's very good so far, and will be completely out by the time of the awards, but it's literally two weeks old. Zero reason an incomplete season 2 should be here instead of a full season getting the nomination next year.
Should've put it in "Best Ongoing" like they did with the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC, Phantom Liberty. It makes way more sense than GOTY for a (very good) expansion pack.
I think I’ve come around to. Not including DLCs ultimately punishes games which iteratively improve themselves, which seems arbitrary. They’ll be punished naturally by voter fatigue/sameyness, and I don’t think erdtree is going to win.
Just to add a little bit of history and context, DLCs seemed to always be authorized to compete in the game awards:
In 2016, the Blood and Wine DLC of Witcher 3 won the Best RPG game category while being in front of Dark Souls 3 !
And I can easily admit that having a reversal of this mis-judgement (for me) by having the Elden Ring DLC win GOTY will be quite the pleasure >:D