The Game Awards is tonight, and it’s dangerous. It’s a showcase of adverts wrapped within the anxieties of an business embarrassingly determined to be taken critically by mainstream tradition. The awards are nugatory. However, a lot of these adverts will announce new games, and so they may look cool. Don’t take The Game Awards critically as an awards present and ah positive, it’s enjoyable sufficient. It’s like a cross-platform, cross-publisher E3 bonanza however in December. Come on, you possibly can watch the stream right here.
The Game Awards begins tonight at 5:30pm Pacific, which is 8:30pm Eastern, and 1:30am on Friday for us right here within the UK.
The present may also be streamed on Twitch, Twitter, Steam, Facebook Live, and a half-dozen other streaming platforms. YouTube has the most effective video participant although.
Awards host Geoff Keighley has mentioned around ten massive revelations are coming at tonight’s present. I’ll be staying up late (properly, getting up extra-early) to cowl them for RPS as they arrive in. Pleasant popsters Chrvhces are performing tonight too, presumably singing their track from Death Stranding. And Green Day are enjoying as properly, as a result of somebody has to please the middle-aged dads I assume are the target market. Also, there are awards.
I can’t over-stress how empty The Game Awards is as a set of awards. It has essentially the most banal and broad focus, devoid of braveness or conviction. Across 29 categories, The Game Awards attracts predictable lists of nominees you’ve heard of then offers an award to at least one as a result of positive, yeah, they’re all good. The winners won’t ever be thrilling, attention-grabbing, difficult, or stunning. You will solely uncover something new for those who’re out of contact with games, and if that’s you then please know that is the least attention-grabbing option to catch up. It’s banal by design, partly as a result of the Advisory Board which “helps guide and advance the mission of The Game Awards” is sort of solely representatives of giant corporations and platformholders like Activision, Microsoft, and Google Stadia (plus Hideo Kojima, for luck).
The awards aren’t even correct. Untitled Goose Game is nominated for Fresh Indie Game, the award for “a new independent studio that released its first game in 2019” even though builders House House [disclosure: they’re pals of mine] launched Push Me Pull You commercially in 2016. Fresh Indie Game, by the best way, is called that as a result of it’s sponsored by Subway, the sandwich store chain whose present branding is constructed upon the phrase “Fresh”.
When folks consult with this hole advert-o-rama as “the Oscars for gaming”, they’re inadvertently delivering a sick burn on the state of gaming.
I’m not saying our advent calendar is ideal (there are at all times extra nice games than we will slot in) however a minimum of we’ve got one thing to share. The Game Awards may as properly choose winners by having Andy “The Pie Man” Smith throw trophy-shaped darts at a listing of the 12 months’s best-selling games.
But, y’know, if you wish to watch adverts — and I do like good adverts — The Game Awards is sweet for that. The games being introduced tonight have been to be introduced a method or one other, so could as properly have them in a single massive glitzy lump.
