What makes a Game of the Year?

In the 10 years it’s been running, Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards has fairly convincingly established itself as the premier awards show for gaming; it is as close as you can get to a video game Oscars, which was seemingly Keighley’s intention all along. While the event is still primarily known for wall-to-wall trailers and game reveals, the awards themselves are growing in reputation, and the top prize — Game of the Year — is coveted by developers and widely perceived as reflective of the general conversation around the year’s best games.

If you look back at the first 10 winners, there’s no doubt that many of them belong in the canon: The Witcher 3, Overwatch, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring. These are great games, no question. But, just like the Oscars, The Game Awards gets a lot of flack from critics and from the most plugged-in, passionate gamers for its safe GOTY choices. Perhaps the best example of this was in 2020, when Sony’s blockbuster The Last of Us Part 2 — a very typical Game Awards game, strong on storytelling and spectacle — triumphed over critical darling Hades, an indie game that swept game-of-the-year accolades from games media (including Polygon’s). In a possible overcorrection, 2021 saw an inexplicable GOTY win for It Takes Two, a relatively minor co-op adventure.

Since then, The Game Awards has shored up its reputation with two consecutive consensus winners that delighted hardcore fans and that few critics would argue with: Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3. But our analysis of previous GOTY nominations and winners, with a particular focus on the last four years, shows some very marked trends, and some very big blind spots. There’s a specific homogeneity to GOTY nominees and winners. There are certain kinds of games that win Game of the Year — and certain kinds that never, ever do.

Ironically for an awards show that is so often dinged by critics, The Game Awards is largely decided by critics. Or journalists, at any rate. The Game Awards are not an industry award like the Oscars, Emmys, or Grammys. Keighley’s organization convenes a large voting jury of gaming media outlets, which is invited to submit its nominations and ranked choices. (Polygon is one.) These votes determine the six nominees. Then, the same games media voting apparatus votes on the nominees, accounting for 90% of the final tally. The other 10% consists of a fan vote through the Game Awards website.

Why do its choices often end up so bland and mainstream, then? Probably because the jury is so big, and so broad — and because each voting site applies its own methodology when selecting its nominations.

In 2023, more than 100 outlets took part, including major gaming sites like IGN, influencers like Kinda Funny, mainstream media like Entertainment Weekly, tech sites like The Verge, and specialists like Touch Arcade. There was an English-language bias — 24 outlets were from the U.S., and 9 from the U.K. — but it was a genuinely international panel, with 33 countries represented. These were predominantly from Europe, but countries like Brazil (9 outlets) and Japan (7 outlets, including the legendary Famitsu) had strong representation, and outlets in South Korea, South Africa, China, Mexico, Turkey, the Middle East, India, the Philippines, and many others had a voice. (There are also specialist juries for the esports and accessibility awards.)

The problem is, there’s no telling how each outlet decides on its own nominations and votes. They might be chosen by an individual, or voted on democratically by a large staff. They might align exactly with that outlet’s published GOTY picks, or they might not.

Diversity in any voting body is a good thing, but at this scale it also has a flattening effect. Where do the tastes of Gamespot, Edge, the LA Times, Ars Technica, Japan’s Dengeki Online, Germany’s PCGames.de, and Saudi Gamer meet? Most likely in the middle, with the most obvious, mainstream choices — upon which the 10% fan voting is another conservative influence.

This jury composition leads us to our strongest indicator for Game of the Year: Metacritic scores. That makes sense — Metacritic is a site that, just like The Game Awards, samples a wide spectrum of games media coverage to settle on a consensus.

All but two of the GOTY winners to date have had a Metascore of 90 or more. The last two winners scored 96. Last year, every nominee but one had a 90-plus Metascore (the exception, Alan Wake 2, scored 89).

This is not to say that every game that scores over 90 will get a nomination, though. There are other conditions to meet first.

With the exception of Baldur’s Gate 3, every GOTY winner to date has come from a major publisher; even It Takes Two is an Electronic Arts release. And aside from those two games, all of the winners of past Game Awards could be described as AAA games. The same is true for the vast majority of nominees.

Indie games can secure a nomination, but they face an uphill battle. Last year, none of the indie releases or smaller games with a 90-plus Metacritic — Against the Storm, Slay the Princess, and the infamously not-really-indie Dave the Diver — secured a nomination for GOTY. In the last four years, there have only been two cases of overlap between Game of the Year and Best Independent Game nominees: Hades and Stray.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the exception that proves the rule. It’s a self-published game from a fully independent studio, but with its high production values and big Dungeons & Dragons license, it doesn’t look like an indie, and it wasn’t nominated in the Independent category — clearing its path to GOTY.

In 2021, the year It Takes Two won, there was a popular, mainstream game from a big publisher with a 92 Metascore, with critical consensus and public support behind it, that didn’t even get nominated: Forza Horizon 5. At The Game Awards, it seems some genres are eligible for Game of the Year consideration, and some aren’t.

There has never been any overlap between the nominees for GOTY and Best Sports/Racing Game, or Sim/Strategy Game, or Fighting Game, or Mobile Game. Overlap with the nominees for Best Family or Action Game is rare.

On the other hand, for the last three years, four of the six GOTY nominees have also been nominated in the Action/Adventure category. And, while role-playing game nominations are less common, if an RPG is nominated, it stands a great chance of winning. Of the 10 winners so far, four have been RPGs and four action-adventures. These genres have a complete stranglehold on Game of the Year — similar to the primacy of dramas winning Best Picture at the Oscars over blockbusters, comedies, and genre movies.

Speaking of drama: There’s a strong bias in GOTY voting toward games with narrative elements. Usually, three or four of the six nominated games are also nominated for TGA’s Best Narrative and Best Performance awards, and a game without a Narrative nomination hasn’t won GOTY since Sekiro in 2019. It’s not unheard of for a systems-led game to win — Overwatch and Zelda: Breath of the Wild stand out — but it’s less common. It seems the TGAs jury finds a kind of legitimacy in strong storytelling and human performance elements, and values them at least as much as game design.

Overwatch’s 2016 win is an anomaly. Normally, multiplayer games aren’t even nominated, and there’s zero overlap between GOTY and the TGA’s own Best Multiplayer category in every other year — barring 2017, when PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds scored a nod. Similarly, the introduction of the Best Ongoing Game category in 2017 has created a sealed-off parallel track for the likes of Fortnite and Final Fantasy 14, rather than bringing these live-service games into the GOTY conversation. In a marked contrast with wider trends in gaming, standalone single-player games rule Game of the Year.

Even though it’s 90% determined by the media jurors, there’s a strong correlation between Game of the Year and the entirely fan-voted categories at The Game Awards. Reflecting the jury’s mainstream leanings, at least half the six GOTY nominees are also nominated for the Players’ Voice award in most years. Even more telling, the Most Anticipated category — a public vote on the most exciting forthcoming game — is a strong predictor of future GOTYs. The winner of this award is almost always nominated for GOTY in its year of release, and on several occasions — The Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, The Last of Us Part 2, and Elden Ring — it has gone on to win. Ignore public sentiment at your peril.

Fairly predictable! GOTY nominees are overwhelmingly story-led, single-player, action-adventure and role-playing games from big publishers with strong popular support and a solid critical consensus behind them. That narrows the field a lot. But — of course — it depends on the games that come out. In a year like 2021, when there are no 90-plus Metascore games that tick the aforementioned genre boxes, it becomes far harder to call — no one would have predicted It Takes Two’s win. Even so, it’s very hard to imagine the circumstances that would see an indie game, a live-service game, or a sports game win GOTY. It’s just unlikely to happen.

Given the broad composition of the jury and the influence of the public vote, that raises questions for the gaming community as a whole about its narrow definition of taste and perception of quality. Video games are a stupendously diverse medium — so why is only a specific subsection of them considered great?