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The backlash against The Game Awards 2023 began almost immediately. Tweets, comments, and Reddit threads all echoed the same concern. For a show with “awards” in the name, The Game Awards sure doesn’t value them. The show announced multiple winners in rapid-fire back-to-back, denying multiple dev teams the opportunity to even say thank you, nevermind acknowledge their loved ones and the teams that helped bring their visions to life. While TGA allowed some speakers, including Metal Gear dev Hideo Kojima, to talk for minutes without anything of substance to say, it silenced others altogether. The truth seems clear: The Game Awards doesn’t care about awards.
The Game Awards Is a Commercial
Christopher Judge, perhaps best known to gamers as the performer behind Kratos in God of War, stands at the center of The Game Awards controversy. In 2022 he won Best Performance and gave a record-breaking speech that clocked in at almost eight minutes. For context, that’s longer than the longest speech ever given at the Academy Awards. To say award shows run on a tight schedule would be an understatement, and TGA wasn’t pleased. This year the show was determined to avoid a repeat performance, so it overcorrected. Instead of giving winners minutes to talk, it gave them seconds. In some cases, TGA denied them the chance to speak at all.
Judge is aware of the ripples he made with last year’s speech. He even cracked a joke about it being longer than Modern Warfare 3‘s campaign. TGA’s decision to silence award recipients isn’t Judge’s fault, even if the show used his speech as a justification. TGA’s decision is about money. Despite its name, The Game Awards isn’t about honoring past works. It’s about selling future ones. The Game Awards is a commercial. It would rather spam you with trailers for things you might pay for than honor the developers of games that you already bought. It’s a future-sighted production that pretends to be about the past, and that isn’t new. Many big-budget shows do the same thing.
Unequal Time and Problematic Comments
Part of what makes TGA’s treatment of winners so awful is that it wasn’t even uniform. If the show had silenced everyone, at least it would’ve felt fair in its snubbing. Instead, the show cherrypicked who it would let rattle on and who it would stifle. The situation isn’t Kojima’s fault this year any more than it was Judge’s fault last year, but that’s not a point in TGA’s favor. When the gaming industry’s biggest companies buy ad spots, you better believe they care more about their product getting shown than anything else. The need to protect the interests of the event’s sponsors has eroded the actual point of the event. Nor is the 2023 controversy the first time that viewers criticized The Game Awards for its handling of industry ties.
In 2021, host Geoff Keighley delivered a tepid condemnation of abuse, harassment, and predatory practices in the gaming industry. Despite his statement being directly prompted by headlines about misconduct within Activision Blizzard, Keighley failed to name names or meaningfully address the issue at all. Many saw this failure as TGA’s attempt to preserve valuable industry connections, even if it was the wrong thing to do. After all, it’s no secret that many players tune into the show to check out trailers for upcoming games. That makes TGA a huge marketing platform for industry giants who care more about players buying their products than anything else.
GOTY Winner Larian Studios Told To Wrap It Up
Sam Lake, the Cocoon devs, and others were dismissed in ways that left a bad taste in many viewers’ mouths. Larian Studios, the team behind Game of the Year winner Baldur’s Gate 3, arguably received the most egregious treatment. Watching the “wrap it up” prompt roll on a dev who was in the middle of honoring someone who had died during the game’s development is Arctic levels of cold.
Yes, it was an automated message, and no, TGA probably had no idea what the Larian team would be talking about when it played. That doesn’t change the incident’s impact. If the rest of the evening had been respectful it might’ve just been a whince-inducing gaffe. Given the general air of consumerist insensitivity, however, it feels gross. In light of last night, TGA should rebrand itself The Game Ads. At least then it would be honest.
