One stupid person. GOTY in 2022 from my experience was mostly Xbox players who had played way more variety of games that year and PS gamers who hadn't even heard of most of them. That's not a dig. Thats just what happened.
Many people trashing High on Life and Pentiment never touched it. More people have played PS exclusives and have a more informed opinion of them. The issue is often people who haven't tried Xbox but still criticizing
Let me outline this because it's important for people to recognise. Games like High on Life, Pentiment and Hi Fi should be side dishes for the platform. Either that or games of that scope need to be released with greater frequency (at least 1-2 per month) for them to have any meaningful impact on the growth of the Xbox platform.
Last year Sony had games like Sifu, Stray and Kena release on their platform exclusively (console, I'm aware they are also on PC, as are all the aforementioned Xbox games). While different types of games, all of those are similar in scope to the games mentioned above and you didn't see anyone unironically saying things like "best new IP in a decade" or "GOTY" when we are in the first quarter of the year.
When you have people making statements like the above it points to a bigger problem and it is one which is embedded. There's a subset of people who are over compensating whenever games of this ilk are released and its possibly because they feel they have no choice. Xbox have put them in that position, nobody else. Xbox needs to get their house in order and either start releasing top quality AA games at a much higher frequency, or keep on doing what they are doing with the AA games and supplement that with some generation defining AAA games.
Nobody serious is saying stuff like Hi Fi Life or Pentiment are bad games, far from it, but with the current release frequency of those types of games people are not rushing out to buy console hardware or subscribe (and stay subscribed, this is actually more important) to gamepass in order to play them. I'm honestly starting to think that the most ardent Xbox fans don't realise that in defending the current state of Xbox they are only helping deepen their problems. If you want the platform to grow and thrive then
something needs to change.