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Alanah Pearce: "The Game Awards is bulllshit. It's a popularity contest"

Big Baller

Al Pachinko, Konami President
Sure thing Alanah. We value your insight in the industry

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Take your shoes off the goddamn chair
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Well yeah, she’s not wrong.
She’s wrong. Cod has the biggest marketing budget and it never gets nominated. A lot of ms first psrty games have huge marketing budgets and they almost never get nominated. Ubisoft games have huge marketing budgets and never get nominated. Ff16 was everywhere and didn’t get nominated. Last year plagues tale got nominated over far bigger games.

Plenty of indie games have gotten nominated. Hades, psychonauts, stray have been nominated each of the last 3 years. And no double fine was pretty much done with psychonauts 2 ms bought them. Celeste was nominated in 2018.

Plenty of smaller games like it takes two which won in 2021, 2d games like metroid dread and even non traditional animal crossing get nominated. There is no first person shooter or Sony cinematic third person bias here. They are simply higher quality than the other games that don’t get nominated. Sekiro beat death stranding. You can’t tell me it had a higher msrkrting budget.

She’s just being retarded. All she has to do is look at the goty awards for the last ten years, and she will see her theory is retarded. You have games that win goty from most of the outlets winning goty at keighleys awards but keighley has fone a great job creating a jury of international critics from every major market. Its why it takes two won goty at vga because it won the most gotys everywhere. Same is true for virtually every single game over the last ten years. Elden ring, tlou2, gow, botw, Witcher 3, dragon age. Only time the vga awards didn’t line up with overall awards was with death stranding and uncharted 4 losing the vga to sekiro and overwatch respectively but they both were relatively close in the overall awards too.

This kind of undermining of award shows is bizarre when it is critics, and industry people nominating and voting on goty awards. She brings up DiCE which is only the industry professionals. It’s incestous like the screen actors guild awards. Fuck the people congratulating each other. At least the critics aren’t voting for themselves.

If these shows were a popularity contest, cod, fifa, fortnite, madden, genshin impact and other gaas trash would be get nominated every year. Nothing is more popular.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
She's not wrong, but she also isn't saying anything new. That's true for any major awards ceremony on any industry, it's not like you're seeing art house films being nominated at the Oscars.
Oscars do this all the time. Everything everywhere at once won just this year and is an indie A24 film. Oh and it beat avatar and top gun. Two of the most popular movies of last year.

Fucking coda won last year. Nomadland the year before that. Parasite the year before that.

Moonlight won over lala land, the silent French film the artist won in 2011.

If anything Oscars reward indie movies a whole lot more than big budget movies.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
.

There are many absolutely stellar smaller indie-style games that deserve to be awarded within their own category, but in the wider superset of games releasing in a given year, smaller games like that just don't provide nearly the same level of entertainment value as the best AAA games.
plenty of indie games have been nominated for best game. Inside, celeste, hades, stray, pschonauts. Plenty of indie games have won awards over big aaa titles. All she had to do was go and look at the history of these awards. I remembered Celeste and Edith finch winning awards so did a quick search and yep, edith finch won best narrative over horizon and nier 2 and Celeste won best indie game but also got nominated for best game alongside spiderman, rdr2, and gow. Disco elysium didn’t get nominated for best game but won best narrative over death stranding, control and all the other goty nominees in 2019.

She is absolutely clueless. This is arguably the greatest most jam packed years in decades and she is bitching about dredd not getting nominated? She’s delusional.
 

Cyberpunkd

Gold Member
Of course it's bull. When you have "an industry" and try to do competitions and awards, it gets political real fast. A Chef once told me how fancier restaurants would not enter local competitions or sponsor events unless they got a guaranteed good grade. No way they would risk their reputation if some nobody won.
Now imagine the problem of having the game awards when everything is paid for by the people you hand out prices to. By companies that don't send out review copies to individuals they don't like.
Add to this the event itself is a major hype machine and you have the typical gaming journo <> publisher relationship.
 

Fess

Member
Is this supposed to be news? It has always been a popularity contest, biggest group of people voting is what will result in the ”best” game of the year, on GAF too. Good luck making the best game of all time on the smallest platform in history, wouldn’t even be nominated.

But her talk that TGA is a global popularity contest is flawed when there are so much more western and US outlets nominating and voting:

Examples of the number of outlets in the jury from a couple different countries:
US: 29
UK: 8
Japan: 7
Germany: 5
Canada: 4
Poland: 2
Finland: 1
Etc

How is that global? Western and especially US politics and platform usage will obviously affect both voting and results since that’s where the majority of votes will come from.
 

Fess

Member
First year i wont be adding to their viewers. She is right, Hogwarts should be in there but Keighly is too scared of those resetera cunts.
Yeah I’ll just check the trailers afterwards. No game there for me this year anyway, I’ve only played 2 of the nominees and finished none so far. This event should be in late january or even later.
 

Woopah

Member
Would somebody like to point out to Alana that every single awards show ever made ever including the oscars is a bullshit popularity contest?
Other game awards have different nominaiton processes, which have different pros and cons from the process used by the TGAs. That's her point.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Is this supposed to be news? It has always been a popularity contest, biggest group of people voting is what will result in the ”best” game of the year, on GAF too. Good luck making the best game of all time on the smallest platform in history, wouldn’t even be nominated.

But her talk that TGA is a global popularity contest is flawed when there are so much more western and US outlets nominating and voting:

Examples of the number of outlets in the jury from a couple different countries:
US: 29
UK: 8
Japan: 7
Germany: 5
Canada: 4
Poland: 2
Finland: 1
Etc

How is that global? Western and especially US politics and platform usage will obviously affect both voting and results since that’s where the majority of votes will come from.
Look up the sales splits. They line up with the votes . Also that’s where the majority of gaming outlets are. Going out of your way to get more diversity by having fucking bangladesh and congo publications join the voting is the opposite of what you want.

The cream of the crop critics deserve to vote having earned it over decades of work in this industry. This is by far the best voting system. Oscar’s use everyone in The industry to vote for themselves. The critics only make up like 10%. The rest are all actors, producers, writers and directors. They actually have several categories where no one other than the category can vote for the nominees. It’s practically incestous and precisely why there is a massive disconnect between the Oscar’s and the movie going audience. They just congratulate each other.

Luckily the critics in our industry And the consumers are more or less on the same page when it comes to gotys. Everyone here would have gone nuts if elden ring lost to stray last year.
 
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Metascore doesn't matter, sales don't matter, all that matters is appealing to bitter journo majors who washed out of their dream gig at the New York Times, and are slumming it in videogames journalism.

Yeah I'll check out the announcements after the show.
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
It's a correct assessment although I don't know if that makes them "bullshit" per se. But there is a reason the Oscars are more prestigious than the People's Choice Awards or whatever. And I think in the game dev community the DICE awards are probably more esteemed than the Game Awards, even if TGA is more watched by orders of magnitude.
 

SHA

Member
Popularity? you think outside of the show too much, there's just announcements, the show is speechless, I'm not against the idea, hopefully things do change.
 
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64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
Alanah's point is predicated on the presupposition that games like Dredge are inherently equal in quality and entertainment value as games like BG3, Zelda TOTK, Elden Ring or TLOU II. The reality is, they aren't and the difference in popularity is a result of the market recognising this difference in perceived quality and entertainment value.

There are many absolutely stellar smaller indie-style games that deserve to be awarded within their own category, but in the wider superset of games releasing in a given year, smaller games like that just don't provide nearly the same level of entertainment value as the best AAA games.
the issue is that this shit is all subjective. While AAAs recieve great levels of success they're also quite maligned by many people on this exact forum. Not to mention the issue with Indies/AA isn't the games themselves, otherwise they wouldn't grow to be one of the most loved categories of games over the past 15 years. It's their obscurity.

While stuff like BG3 or Elden Ring did organically grow to get their immense popularity, games like TOTK, TLOU 2 or Ragnarok had massive marketing campaigns and hype backing them up, overshadowing otherwise just as worthy GOTY contenders like AC6, Pizza Tower or Hi-Fi Rush.

The best solution in my opinion is to not have a set category of like 6 games for GOTY and just let every game that they can count as released in that year be allowed to be nominated. It's such a weird and outdated system to limit the possible votes of GOTY contenders to like, 6 games. 6 games that everybody might have not played.
 

ManaByte

Banned
She is right, Hogwarts should be in there but Keighly is too scared of those resetera cunts.

The highest selling new IP in 2023 is being ignored. If it weren't for Mario and Zelda coming out this year it'd easily be my GOTY. Nearly platinumed it on PS5 and playing through it again on Xbox (and then a third time on Steam). You don't even need to like HP to appreciate what they did with that game.
 
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People like to think TGA are akin to the “Oscars of gaming” but it’s more like the Peoples Choice or MTV Music awards of gaming. No one in the industry is voting on these, it’s all journalists. The same journalists we always rip on for their pandering bullshit. Like whining about modern police brutality while reviewing Robocop. No wonder Hogwarts didn’t get a single nod.

The categories also don’t make any sense. If a game is nominated for GOTY, why bother putting it in another category? For example, three of the GOTY candidates are in action adventure GOTY as well. So I guess whichever of the three GOTY candidates loses that category, we can automatically assume they don’t win overall GOTY?

Because it’s a popularity contest among journalists who mostly don’t know shit, you also get stuff like an esports coach getting a nomination when they weren’t even working during the year, and an indie game that isn’t an indie game getting nominated for indie game.

Just browse GAF for the trailers and news.
 

Fess

Member
Look up the sales splits. They line up with the votes . Also that’s where the majority of gaming outlets are. Going out of your way to get more diversity by having fucking bangladesh and congo publications join the voting is the opposite of what you want.

The cream of the crop critics deserve to vote having earned it over decades of work in this industry. This is by far the best voting system. Oscar’s use everyone in The industry to vote for themselves. The critics only make up like 10%. The rest are all actors, producers, writers and directors. They actually have several categories where no one other than the category can vote for the nominees. It’s practically incestous and precisely why there is a massive disconnect between the Oscar’s and the movie going audience. They just congratulate each other.

Luckily the critics in our industry And the consumers are more or less on the same page when it comes to gotys. Everyone here would have gone nuts if elden ring lost to stray last year.
US market alone is 4 times bigger than Japan? China is just 4 times bigger than Finland?

Maybe that’s how it is I don’t know, either way this only highlight how western-centric everything is in the hobby and why politically charged subjects from a western perspective will always make things difficult for games or devs not applying the same politics. Can’t say if that’s what happened to Hogwarts but considering how some outlets avoided even talking about it I’m not surprised that it’s not there. Would be verrry interesting to see a top 20 list from jury votes and how each outlets voted.

Anyway, in the end it’s an event focused on praising widespread appeal and this year it’s another Mario, another Spider-Man, another Zelda etc. None of the new IPs I’ve played this year was nominated and I’ve only played 2 of the sequel games nominated. For me it makes the whole thing uninteresting. I’ll check out the trailers afterwards though.
 
Ummm.... being popular should literally be one of the main criteria for Game Of The Year.

I know there are plenty of more obscure games that aren't so mainstream that are amazing and maybe would even be more popular if they were more accessible or marketed more. The success of a game should factor into whether it is game of the year or not because a lot of times it is because of word of mouth and the fact that the games are really good and accessible to a lot of people.

The game like Dredge or whatever could be considered a cult hit or a sleeper hit and maybe there should be a category for games like those.
 

SnapShot

Member
As hypocritical as it may sound: She's like that lame friend who always brags about not doing something but goes ahead and does it anyways

Pretty face and nice bobs though
 
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Elysium44

Banned
What's up with the hypercriticalness towards her?

As if her opinions are any less valuable than any of our own cause she's hot AF, and leverages it.
You've answered the question yourself, nobody would care about her mutterings if they didn't want to have sex with her.

Time she experienced real equality, don't give her any attention at all. No threads, no links, no clicks.

These type of women who enter male gaming spaces just to exploit men's thirst are the worst.
 
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You've answered the question yourself, nobody would care about her mutterings if they didn't want to have sex with her.

Time she experienced real equality, don't give her any attention at all. No threads, no links, no clicks.

These type of women who enter male gaming spaces just to exploit men's thirst are the worst.
Isn't that the business, though?

She's identified a void and filled it. I'm not mad at her, is all I'm saying.
 

Elysium44

Banned
Isn't that the business, though?

She's identified a void and filled it. I'm not mad at her, is all I'm saying.

Yes there is a business for pretending to be friendly and accessible to men who she likely wouldn't give the time of day to in real life, but it doesn't mean we should tolerate it. But unfortunately most of us men are weak - I understand it but I don't have to like it.
 

Neon Xenon

Member
Alanah's not wrong.

What I personally feel is that awards shows and events like the TGAs (The The Game Awards?) are only worth what stock I could put into them, but I've stopped caring about awards shows in general years ago. I understand that people genuinely like these awards shows, but I just don't care about them anymore. And there is no "But what if something weird or cringe happens?????" moment that I would want to watch for, either.

The only things about this particular award show I would actually want to watch are announcements and trailers for upcoming games. So there's no point in me watching at all for world premiere trailers when said trailers will go online soon after the show or even during the show, less when I could just have an open tab for Gematsu and see news get posted there.

It's like when that Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance trailer got leaked all those years back and sapped any need to sit through the show just for that.
 
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