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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 becomes first indie game to win Game of the Year at The Game Awards
Definitely a well deserved GOTY. I haven't gotten around to it yet, but my friends have been raving about it!
Lots of indie games nominated this year. Really feels like we're in a golden age of indies.
Also worth mentioning:
Didn't Disco Elysium win and was also a debut indie?
No, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice won in 2019. Looks like Disco Elysium wasn't nominated for GOTY. It did win best indie, best debut indie, best RPG, and best narrative.
Oh you're right i got them confused. Disco got goth prizes from others but not TGA.
Have to say, i liked sekiro but wouldn't put it above disco Elysium in a million years.
Blue Prince not even getting a nomination is tragic, but with (apparently) a lot of international people involved in the decisions I guess it makes sense. It's a game deeply reliant on English wordplay, and it's probably one of, if not the, least translateable game I've ever seen.
Still gonna be a little salty about it though.
E33 has a great soundtrack, though I too haven't played the game yet. I'm looking forward to picking it up, probably when I get something beefier than my Steam Deck. Maybe if it goes on a nice sale I'll pick it up earlier and hope it runs ok.
Blue Prince was nominated for best indie and best debut, right?
Yes but lost to Expedition 33
Oh, you're right! Somehow I missed that! That's something at least, though I still think it deserved more.
How easy to spot someone from USA...
I'd agree with you if it wasn't about the US owned and operated TGA.
Well sort of... Geoff is Canadian but you get my point.
US centrism can be an issue on the internet but I think this one falls short of being problematic.
Yes, but the phrase itself is the issue - like there is this one central, middle, main country and everyone else is "international".
Edit: I don't want to make this much of a problem, just something that caught my eye immediately.
I'm fine with it getting GOTY, I know it's a good game a lot of people love, even though I'll never play it because it is not at all the kind of game I would enjoy.
The problem I have is that it also swept basically every other major category. It's really annoying. If a game is going to win GOTY, it shouldnt win other awards unless it is an overwhelming best of the category. So many of those other games are so deserving of awards and they get snubbed just because they happened to release the same year this game did? How is that fair?
Once they determine the GOTY winner they should get a handicap on all other categories to let other games shine that deserve some recognition
From what has been stated publicly by past TGA jury participants such as in a recent Alanah Pearce video, there's no discourse between TGA jurors about what "should" or "shouldn't" win. The jury is made up of a semi random selection of games journalists and industry professionals who are contacted remotely by TGA, and are not required to converse with each other, justify their nominations or votes, or even demonstrate that they played the games they're nominating or voting for at all. They're basically mailing in ballots, and TGA just tallies them up, mixes them with the fan votes with the 90%/10% weighting, and shows us the results.
Frankly, at the end of the day, this is just "some guy's opinion" except in an aggregate form of many "some guys." In a way, by participating the journalists and industry professionals on the TGA jury are kinda inadvertently using it as a reward apparatus by which they incetivize the industry to push in certain directions, and I think this is most seen in the types of games that rarely or never get nominated for GotY.
The games industry's desperation for validation tends to manifest as a little-brother-syndrome to the film industry, and this is super apparent with the presence of film trailers and famous people showing up at TGA, as well as how certain types of games (looking at first-party playstation single player stuff) always feel like shoe-ins to GotY and certain categories.
Some genres feel practically walled out from even being in the GotY category even though there's technically no barrier to nomination other than that the jury believes mostly big cinematic games deserve it.
For random example, if enough games journalists and industry professionals believed block puzzlers were capable of being GotY maybe Lumines Arise could've been nominated. As far as we know, there's no authority at TGA saying "no" to that, just the jury is not nominating it enough, and same goes for anywhere else that games didn't get nominated or win. They're kind of silent, collective disregard snubs, not authoritative someone-in-charge said "no" snubs.
So the idea that they like, authoritatively/curatorially/editorially (idk which one I'm looking for) determine a GOTY through discourse with authoritative TGA organizers and then subsequently can curate the other categories to disallow a sweep just isn't how it's known to work currently. (Unless we think past participants and TGA are both being dishonest about the process.)
If you're advocating that they should change their system away from all this to a group who actually debate and have discourse with each other (I believe this happens with
golden joystickBAFTA, for example), then yeah that's a completely fair take, but it's a bigger change than it is if you think they're already like that and you just want basic sweep prevention added on top.The awards part of the show honestly shouldn't really hold any serious meaning to anybody except maybe some winners and nominees for whom saying they worked on a TGA winner might be a career boon. Again, just the opinion of a bunch of "some guys" - I don't think there's truly any good reason for the consumer/audience to care who wins what. For the average gamer, I think this show is best viewed as a trailer showcase.
Yeah I'm saying they should change it. They already weight the audience score like you said, I don't think it would be that unreasonable to weight against the GOTY winner in other categories.
Definitely an understandable sentiment, but I think the way it is now makes a lot more logical sense.
Yes a few games got recognition, but so many deserving games were left out to dry. Silksong is also a huge fan favorite but it didnt win a lot because it just happened to release the same year as E33. How is that fair to Silksong? If it had released last year would it have won more? Probably.
Yes not every element of a game is going to be amazing, even the GOTY winner, but they've already received the highest honor you can get. Unless it truly was miles above every other game in terms of soundtrack or performance or something. But I think every category had very deserving nominees that got screwed because E33 is the popular choice. Troy Baker should have taken best performance easily. But since it's just a popularity contest and not as many people played the game (or the fact that it came out over a year ago and a lot of people have poor memories) he was denied. Also a damn shame it wasn't nominated for many other categories which I think goes back to the memory issue.
I think the opposite is also true. It was obvious E33 was a favorite, and less than an hour in, it had won several awards already, everything it was nominated for, so it was obvious it was going to win GOTY. So there was zero excitement on who would win it, it was obvious. If it hadn't won anything or only one or two the whole show there would be doubt in people's minds as to whether it was as popular as people thought it would be (which happens all the time, look at TOTK, lot of love but barely won anything that year)
And this is the problem I think. This is a poor way to view it. A game winning GOTY is the ultimate reward. I think it should be viewed more as ok this is the best game this year, now what other games had the best soundtrack, best acting, best direction, etc. and again I don't think it should be barred from winning anything else outright, just given a handicap on the scoring to allow other gems to shine as well. So if it does win another award it's really like damn that game had a truly amazing soundtrack. Instead of the way it is now which is basically, oh this is the popular game so it'll just win every category. That's boring.
Also it sucks for people who aren't fans of the game or genre that the popular vote is that year. I have zero interest in E33 or Silksong. But because those are the popular ones they win all the awards, if E33 hadn't released I'm sure Silksong would've done the same thing and this would be the same conversation. I would vote for Indiana Jones or Blue Prince as GOTY as those are games I loved and thought should win. But they aren't the popular vote, so whatever, that's fine. But it's frustrating that they get no recognition at all when they are such amazing games in their respective genres. And for people who are fans of these games and not E33 (we do exist!) it's disappointing.
Even if a game I enjoyed was the GOTY winner. I still wouldn't want it to win every award. It takes the fun out of the suspense when one game is grabbing everything. The recognition should be spread around.
Whenever a game I love loses, I always ask this myself. Sadly, this is the fundamental flaw of a "best [media] of a particular year" contest. If the question you're asking is "which is the best game that happened to release during 2025", then really good games getting snubbed is what you're signing up for. Let's say in year x, the GOTY is a 97/100, and in year x+1, the GOTY is a 99/100, and there's a 98/100 game that came out in February and lost to the 99/100. It got snubbed, yes. But what can you do? Delay the game unnecessarily 10 months and make fans wait, or rush it 3 months early and ruin the quality? Just for an awards show? Not worth it.
More fair competition of games on their own merits is better served by stuff like critic review scores. If you make a "best games of all time" or "best games of the decade" contest, you no longer have games getting snubbed for release date reasons, but instead you have to weight stuff like how good games were at release vs how their legacy held up, and how economic situations like COVID or 2008 affected the game. If you stick to 1 year, all the games don't have a legacy let, and released in the same market.
As for the categories, IMO handicapping the GOTY would make the award's name disingenuous. If GOTY also happened to have the strongest soundtrack, it should get that award. If a game only wins best soundtrack because the actual best soundtrack was handicapped, then the name of the award should really be "best soundtrack (excluding GOTY)."
Conversely, how is it fair to the GOTY winner to be kneecapped in other categories? Just because they won game of the year they now have to be x% better than the next best soundtrack?
GOTY is the highest honor you can get. You've already won everything if you win that.
It'd be like if someone took the gold medal, and the silver and the bronze. No one else gets a medal then? That's probably a bad metaphor but that's what it feels like.
I don't think it's unfair for the winner to be kneecapped because they already have the best thing you can have. Anything else is just extra. Lets spread the love a little instead of piling all the eggs in one basket.
I don't think the medals thing works particularly well here. That would be Michael Phelps taking all three medals in a single event.
I'm arguing that game of the year is the medley relay, representing a whole team working together. But just because Team USA won the medley relay, I don't think they should be penalized in individual events. Should Michael Phelps have been penalized in his individual event for winning the team medley? Should the other competitors view it as unfair that Michel Phelps existed at the Olympics in the same year?
Yeah it's a bad analogy. Because events are different tasks graded individually whereas games are a single thing graded in different criteria. I'm struggling to think of a good analogy though.
I don't think my bad analogy discounts what I'm trying to say though.
I don't think that analogy makes sense. It would be more like when Michael Phelps won like 10 gold metals at the same olympics in various swimming categories. Which did happen, and was fine?
Not all GOTY titles are multifaceted like this time. Astro Bot won last year; it definitely did NOT win in Best Narrative.
In general, I feel like people get a bit too worked up about TGA. It's not that serious, in the end.
I still don't understand in what capacity Clair Obscur qualifies as an indie. It has a publisher, Kepler, and a budget that dwarfs any other indie that was nominated. I love Clair Obscur, especially since it's made by my countrymen, but how is that fair to anyone else nominated in the category?
As with indie films and music, it's indeed a good question what is an indie game and what isn't. The Game Awards have certainly got it wrong before. I got curious, so I dug into this a little bit. Perhaps their reasoning here could be:
Wikipedia notes that Kepler was set up by seven independent game studios and that "Kepler itself will not interefere [sic] with the operations of each studio, allowing them to stay independent".
This year, I believe Hades II was the only game in the indie category that was self-published by the company that developed it. All others had publishers.
Reportedly, the game's budget was under $10 million. I don't know what the other games have cost to make, but Hades II is estimated to have had a budget similar to the first game, which was around $15 million.
"Indie" games are getting expensive to make.
But personally, I still see games like Hades II, Blue Prince, Hollow Knight: Silksong and Clair Obscur as indies, just they are different kind of indies than something like a single-developer shoestring budget game. Maybe there should be more categories. In a perfect world, one for each game, so that everyone could be a winner? (Making games is hard. If you manage to get something out, I think you are already a winner.)
I... Okay. I did not know that, that's bloody insane to me and changes my perspective. I guess it makes sense in some manner; despite the difference in technical prowess, Clair Obscur reuses assets frequently and I assume Hades II features more voice acted audio, writing and 2D animation overall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_Interactive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Obscur:_Expedition_33
Geoff Keighley defined "indie game" during the show as "games made outside the normal publishing structure". I'd definitely say that Kepler and Sandfall's situations are different than, say, Retro Studios, an established studio, being contracted by Nintendo to make a Metroid game, or other more conventional game publishing situations.
https://levvvel.com/hades-statistics/
https://levvvel.com/hollow-knight-statistics/
The competition, Silksong and Hades II, are established IPs funded by multi-millionaires. Expedition 33 is a new IP and a new studio's debut title, published by a collective of independent studios.
It seems like I didn't have a proper scale of things when I made the remark, I guess that's fair. I feel a lot more comfortable with this result knowing this.
Though... man, it is fascinating to see just how little difference there is between independent productions and conventional ones now.
Something interesting to think about is that out of all the games that received any nominations, the one that likely has the largest budget is Genshin Impact, which reportedly has cost over $700m to develop.
Is that throughout its entire lifecycle or before launch? Because I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say they make that amount in a month. Gacha games pull cash like no other.
No one uses "indie game" to refer only to games without a publisher. And I say this as someone who likes tiny super-indie art games that are free on itch.io as well as more commercially successful indie titles and does indeed see the difference between different "levels" of indie-ness. There's no coherent definition of an indie game that excludes all games that have a publisher that doesn't exclude huge swaths of games that are very obviously indie games by any definition that more than one person actually uses in practice.
Devolver Digital is a publisher that specializes in "indie" games.
It's a mess, but the games are usually pretty good so I don't care to quibble too much.
Yeah, ultimately as vague as the current definition of "indie" is, it does successfully manage to describe the category of games that I want to spend most of my time focusing on in a way that the even more nebulous "AA" does not. Sure, it'd be nice to have more granular terminology to distinguish between something like Hades or E33 and truly tiny art games, but there's a huge spectrum in between so it would really only result in more repeats of the same arguments over semantics.
Very cool. 412 people listed in the credits says to me this is a AA title with a lot of money behind it.
As discussed in another thread, it's definitely in line with the other big indies in the competition:
That figure blows my mind. Where does the ~$10M come from? As an indie (independent and individual) I made a game that was featured on a GOTY list in 2023 (not this one) with a credit list of 2 people (me and a musician) and a budget of 3 weeks work (and no funding!).
It was funded by Kepler Interactive, who are a partnership of several different indie studios.
That sounds like a lot of money, but when you consider how many years it took to make the game, how many devs worked on it, and how much labor costs, it's really impressive they made it for so cheap!
I definitely think there should be a separate term for "made without corporate ownership" and "made by 1 or 2 guys on no budget", but at the moment those two types of indie games share the same category. The "debut indie" category tries to make that distinction, but it doesn't really work when new studios are able to secure funding.
And congrats on making it into the Game Awards! There's a gazillion indie games released each year, so that's no small feat.
Oh, it wasn't this one! But thanks. I think you're right that there should be different by awards for the two extremes of "indie" games. It's complicated.
Core team is small: https://www.sandfall.co/team
AFAIK.
Looks like a lot of people was working on voice acting, music, localization, etc. etc.
Right, like any AA title.
I loved the game. It's nice it won a bunch of "awards". It is important to remember that the "Video Game Awards" has always just been a marketing vessel and at least Geoff does a better job with it than Spike TV ever did. Half the awards were just quickly read off a list. That's not a real awards show. That's a marketing show with some awards shoehorned into it.
If you care about awards, the BAFTAs or Dice awards, voted on by people in the industry, would be more relevant.
I'm sad Silksong didn't win but I think it never stood a chance against the kind of game E33 is for an awards show like this, but its still by far my GOTY.
Hey, at least it won Best Action/Adventure game. KC:D2 didn't even have a chance since E33 was nominated for Best RPG too.
A little side note related to the awards last night, I think Geoff Knightly shouldn't be presenting any of those middle awards that don't get a stage anymore. I always see it on his face which one is going to win because he just starts smiling at the winner.
I also hate that Andrew Schulz is going to be in the Street Fighter movie. I probably wasn't going to watch it anyways but I hate that guy.
There was a lot of indie talent this year, and I don't think it lessens the other nominees that the award can only go to one game. No Half Life announcement on the other hand is a little upsetting.
Half Life was never going to be announced at TGA. Valve will do their own announcement in their own way in their own time, literally Valve Time, lol. They are a household name at this point, arguably the biggest in the industry, they aren't going to announce at someone else's event.
Also they don't need the viewer boost. You think the second the announcement trailer drops it's not going to be plastered across every gaming news site and forum across the world in minutes? It's the biggest gaming meme of all time, and huge news that Valve actually made it, it'll be everywhere instantly
The biggest evidence for this is how Valve just revealed 3 new hardware products on their own terms on a random Friday with a YouTube video and some listings on Steam. There was a Game Awards between that announcement and the release date, so why not wait until last night to announce it? Because we all heard about it anyways.
They let the early access for their newest game, Deadlock, spread with word of mouth alone, and to this day haven't officially announced it yet.
Some random Tuesday they'll release a blog post all casual-like "btw, here's the Half Life 3 trailer" as if we haven't been waiting roughly 20 years for it.
Edit: I didn't mean that bolded "3" as a meme hint for Half Life 3, I was just emphasizing how large of an announcement 3 products at once is, but it's a funny coincidence lol.
That and Half-Life Alyx was announced the same way. Just a trailer drop on a random day they picked. And hype spread like wildfire.
Though being VR I don't think it was as explosive as Half Life 3 will be when it drops sometime soonish? Who knows when
I've just heard one of the devs saying something along the lines "It's great that small studios with low budget stand a chance" and just a moment before this was said I heard this "low budget" was like 8 million USD. What the heck is low about 8 freaking million USD???
I don't mean it in a bad way, I believe that they are small studio in comparison to today's behemots. I also believe they made the gamd for a fraction of price of games from said behemots. But still - 8 million is low budget.
I should read a bit about the game, as I believe it made itself significant by how great it would be.
Movies, TV shows, and video games are expensive to make to modern standards. If you assemble a 30 person team of programmers, musicians, 3D modelers, etc. for a 6 year project like Expedition 33, then hire a few voice actors, paying everyone's salary adds up. Getting 10 programmers who make, say, 100k a year, for a 6 year project is roughly 6 million dollars.
As mentioned in a few other comment threads, that 8 million budget is a lot lower than other indies like Hades 1 and 2, which were closer to 15 million.
To make a game with less budget than this, it basically needs to be a tiny game with bad graphics, or it needs to grow over time with updates.