In a tough year for video games, the Game Awards nominations give some cause for hope

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Not long after the Game Awards nominations were announced on Monday, we at Polygon noticed something interesting happening in our web traffic. Readers were clicking from our story about the nominations through to reviews of some of the games that had been recognized — and they were doing so in surprisingly large numbers. Our review of indie card game Balatro, which was nominated for Game of the Year, was read by more people on Monday than it was in its entire first week of publication in February. Reviews of fellow GOTY nominees Metaphor: ReFantazio and Astro Bot and indie contender Neva all saw significant bumps in readership, too. It seemed like people were more curious than usual about this year’s nominees, and wanted to know more.

This is the bonus of a year with a slightly sparse release schedule and no consensus narrative about Game of the Year contenders. If you’d been following the awards race closely, there were few surprises in the Game Awards voting jury’s choices. But if you hadn’t — or if you hadn’t been following video games in general that closely this year — the list of nominations presented a lot of unfamiliar names, and a pile of great games to discover.

This was the main takeaway from Monday’s nominations list. TGA’s voting jury is large and internationally diverse, and in the past its collective taste has tended to settle in a rather conservative place. But the industry’s lean year has led the jury to a suite of nominees that is varied, high-quality, and culturally rich.

Look at the six nominees for Game of the Year. There is only one sequel from a big franchise (Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth). There is a candy-colored, all-ages platformer (Astro Bot). There is an original role-playing epic from a studio operating deep within its niche (Metaphor: ReFantazio). There is an abstract indie card game made by a solo developer (Balatro). There is the first-ever game from China to get a GOTY nomination (Black Myth: Wukong). And — controversially — there is an expansion pack (Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree).

Setting aside the downloadable content controversy for a moment, the prevalence of original games in the GOTY lineup is heartening. And quality isn’t an issue. 2021 was the last year the nominees felt this broad and the race this open — which was also the only year that all the GOTY nominees scored 90 or lower on Metacritic. This year, all but one have scores exceeding 90 — and whether you set store in Metacritic’s method of review aggregation or not, it can’t be disputed that these are some genuinely good games. The game industry’s financial health and stability are in question, but if these nominations are anything to go by, its creative health is strong.

Down the ballot, things are a little less adventurous, but there are still signs of a broadening of the voting jury’s horizons. Two of my favorite games this year were Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess and Pacific Drive — both highly unusual, slightly awkward genre hybrids. I would never have expected either to get nominated at The Game Awards, but they’ve both been recognized (in Best Sim/Strategy and Best Debut Indie, respectively). 

There are a few other trends worth highlighting. Perhaps most noticeable: 2024 is the year of the role-playing game, while action-adventures are on the wane. These two genre categories have historically been the strongest by far in terms of GOTY nominees and winners at The Game Awards. Typically, at least half the GOTY nominees have been shared with the Best Action/Adventure Game category, but this year there is only one (Astro Bot, which is nominated in Best Family Game, too). Meanwhile, three RPGs are represented. The RPG category itself is so deep that even a big player like Dragon Age: The Veilguard couldn’t score a nomination. Yet over in Best Action/Adventure, room could be found for Ubisoft’s underperforming Star Wars Outlaws, even with its 75 Metascore.

Despite Balatro’s breakout nominations in Game of the Year and Game Direction, the siloing of indie games continues to be a problem at The Game Awards. There’s quite a lot of room for smaller games to be recognized across the two indie categories and the indie-skewing Games for Impact, but you can count indie nominations across all the other genre and craft categories on the fingers of one hand: Neva in Art Direction, No Man’s Sky in Community Support, The Plucky Squire in Family Game, Frostpunk 2 and Manor Lords in Sim/Strategy. Fantastic, acclaimed games like Arco, Tactical Breach Wizards, Mouthwashing, 1000xResist, and Satisfactory didn’t make the cut. Considering the incredible quantity and quality of indie releases in this and every year, it feels as though the jury’s indie blinkers are still on.

It was surprising, perhaps, to see Sony Interactive Entertainment top the nominations table yet again, with 15 — most of them for Astro Bot and Helldivers 2. The company had downplayed its slate for 2024 and perhaps didn’t fully appreciate what it had in these two games before they were released. Microsoft’s aggregate total across Xbox Game Studios, Activision, and Blizzard is not far behind at 12 nominations, though — and this was a year with no qualifying Bethesda releases. Next year, Microsoft’s stacked slate includes Fable, Avowed, and Doom: The Dark Ages, while Sony has Death Stranding 2 and Ghost of Yotei for starters. The rivalry between these two huge stables of studios is heating up.

Nintendo’s relatively poor performance (six nominations) was to be expected, considering Switch 2’s reported delay into next year. But the Japanese industry as a whole is in rude health as far as the voting jury is concerned, with Square Enix, Sega, and Bandai Namco all boasting major nomination hauls and leaving the likes of Ubisoft, EA, and 2K in the dust. Are Japanese publishers adapting better to the challenges of the moment — in which AAA development is rapidly becoming unaffordable — than their Western counterparts? Creatively, at least, it seems like they might be.

As for Shadow of the Erdtree’s nomination: This appears to have blindsided the public, leading to a lot of angry reactions. An eleventh-hour clarification about its eligibility from The Game Awards didn’t seem to help. There are valid debates to be had about the creative merit of expansions versus original games or iterative sequels. There are also valid questions to be asked about the extent to which The Game Awards outsources tricky delineations like this to a large, diverse jury that likely doesn’t see them all the same way.

But The Game Awards has at least been consistent in its messaging to both the jury and the public that “creative and technical excellence” is what matters, regardless of the wrapper it comes in. That stance suits a medium as multifaceted and constantly evolving as video games. It’s also what allows a pixelated card game made by one person to take its place on the roll of honor alongside mega-budget blockbusters, and to reach crowds of curious new players in the process. Maybe a bit of confusion and controversy is a price worth paying for that.