As the year winds down, gaming fans everywhere patiently await for The Game Awards, an annual celebration of the year's most influential games that won't even let COVID-19 stop it. Fans are also treated to world premieres and first looks at games they can expect to release next year and years to come.
Recently, in an interview on Kinda Funny's We Have Cool Friends podcast, Geoff Keighley, the host of The Game Awards, expressed that a game does not necessarily need to have been released that year to win Game of the Year. In fact, Keighley stresses that the coveted title is reserved for whichever game best encompassed the conversation of gaming that year.
While this may sound like a new qualification based on this year's staggered releases after the COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted gaming's production and supply, Keighley actually went on to say that this rule has been in place the whole time. Keighley views The Game Awards as something more akin to the Emmys, where shows are eligible for accolades so long as they're currently running. In this case, since games don't necessarily have seasons in the same vein as the television show, they are eligible by simply being an important game that year.
Keighley then went on to say that he could even see a future where the same game winds Game of the Year multiple years in a row. Thinking about it, it certainly makes sense that an insanely popular game like Minecraft or Fortnite could gather enough steam to warrant winning that title twice. It certainly poses an interesting thought that a game released all the way back in 2015 can win Game of the Year in 2020.
This is great news for games like Among Us or Hades that, while they've been out for a while now, haven't quite received the attention they deserve until now. Among Us, released in 2018, hasn't entered the conversation until this year where it's highly regarded as not only a fantastic social deduction game, but has plenty of potential for memes and inside jokes on the internet. Hades, released in 2018 in early access, recently caught everyone's attention after being brought over to the Switch while high acclaim.
While some people may scoff at the notion that an old game could win Game of the Year, it is a refreshing take that an awards show focuses on which game was most important that year and refuses to disqualify something for its release date.
The Game Awards will air on December 10, 2020.
Source: DualShockers