The Hype Award

The Game Awards season is officially underway with Keighly’s Nomination Kickoff where he announced all of the nominations for 2024’s Game Awards across its 29 competing categories. With that comes the same yearly rounds: Content creators will establish their top lists of the year, we’ll argue about the annual controversial nomination, and some ☝🤓’s will point out that The Game Awards is just a bunch of trailers; as if that isn’t half the reason fans watch.

I don’t mean to come across as bitter either, I love The Game Awards!  I tune into all my favorite creator’s top-lists, I find the debate of Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion qualifying as a Game of the Year nominee interesting and important, and I love watching game trailers like Anton Ego loves food (as long as they don’t come at the expense of the developer’s well-earned recognition).  I enjoy most of the conversation that happens around this time of year, but one I don’t see often regards the competitive categories themselves.

There are 29 categories awarded at The Game Awards in total, yet, the conversation is dominated mainly by Game of the Year and supplemented by the occasional amazing performance, standout indie, or best in a respective genre.  If you look, there are plenty of interesting categories in The Game Awards that are unique to gaming as opposed to a more traditional award program, such as the Academy Awards, that are quickly glossed over during the show. There’s Best Community Support, Best eSports Game, Athlete, and Team, Best Content Creator, etc; but one that particularly stands out to me as unlike any other award is Most Anticipated Game.

Well hey, here’s The Game Award for me!  One relevant to both my livelihood (marketing) and my leisure-hood (gaming).  In practice, though, this leaves a sour taste in my mouth for several reasons.

In a world of common release-day disappointments, it’s ridiculous to offer an award to a team for generating hype without there being any check or balance that they meet the expectations they set.  Theoretically, someone could create a game trailer so convincing that they win Most Anticipated Game without ever actually releasing the game.

It’s also an award with little objective basis.  When it comes to categories such as Best Performance, Best Art Direction, Best Narrative, Game of the Year, etc., there’s at least some objectivity to take into consideration: The demonstrated ability to immerse your audience, a truly-dynamic world, a new game mechanic, technical feats, the list goes on.  Most Anticipated Game presents as little more than a popularity contest. There can’t even be the illusion of objectivity when developers/publishers are not held accountable to the hype they create.

We’ve already seen this happen, too.  No Man’s Sky from Hello Games won Most Anticipated Game in 2016 despite going on to live in infamy for missing every expectation they set.  Now, I truly believe Sean Murray set expectations so high due to his hopes and excitement rather than greed or any unsavory reason, but the end result is the same; they created enough hype to win an award despite not delivering on those promises at release. 

Not only may this award subtly influence publishers to embellish the contents and capabilities of their game, but it can encourage a longer, more drawn-out marketing campaign as well.  Elden Ring won Most Anticipated Game in 2020 and 2021.  It’s commonplace to joke about Bethesda dropping that Elder Scrolls 6 Teaser way back in 2018, and rightfully so – yet it may very well have won Most Anticipated Game that year if the award were present for 2018’s show despite receiving no significant news of the game since. 

“So what?  Who cares?”

Awards are commonly used for advertising purposes. You won’t see “Winner of Most Anticipated Game” on any game cases, but you may see “Three Time The Game Awards winner.”  Heck, in Hollywood they use nominations as a measure of credit in marketing.  Most Anticipated Game is an award given to a team for building unfounded expectations that can potentially be used to give those claims a degree of legitimacy.

Fortunately, Most Anticipated Game isn’t the Most Anticipated Category.  The worries I’ve listed hinge on the The Game Awards in general being of major import to publishers, and that doesn’t seem to be the case at this time. Maybe Most Anticipated Game isn’t the driving factor for deceptive marketing any more than the desire to have your product seen is. The Day Before wasn’t ever nominated for Most Anticipated Game in the years before “release,” yet they deceived their would-be customers to the highest degree we may have ever seen in the industry anyway (If you’re unfamiliar, I recommend SkillUp’s video covering this story).

Ultimately, Most Anticipated Game is something of a throwaway award in an award show that, from what I can gather, exists only by sheer force of will on Geoff Keighly’s part.  It holds no legitimacy beyond the opinions of a collection of international outlets and isn’t recognized as the end-all-be-all award show to gaming in the way that the Grammy’s are to music.  That said, I root for the overall legitimacy of games as media, and the prestige of any medium is reflected in how it’s celebrated.  The Game Awards are currently a long shot from its EGOT brethren. That’s not to say The Game Awards should strive to perfectly emulate them, but if the goal is to eventually have a similar legitimacy, merit, and weight behind their name they ought to keep awards strictly to developers and the games themselves, and at least award games on what is and not what could be.