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The Game Awards is an annual awards ceremony honoring achievements in the video game industry. Established in 2014, the shows are produced and hosted by game journalist Geoff Keighley, who worked on its predecessor, the Spike Video Game Awards, for over ten years.[1] With the permission of Spike, he worked with several video game companies to create the show. In addition to the awards, the Game Awards features premieres of upcoming games and new information on previously-announced titles. The show's reception is generally mixed: it has been lauded for its announcements and criticized for its lack of acknowledgement of events, use of promotional content and its treatment of award winners.
The ceremony is held in the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, California.[2] Keighley has been offered on several occasions by television networks to air the show, with him turning them down. The Game Awards has a committee composed of representatives of companies such as Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. They select over a hundred video game press organizations eligible for nomination, and vote on games in the show's categories. Keighley and the committee itself does not participate in voting. Games released before a specific date in November are eligible for nomination. Games releasing after that deadline are eligible for the following year's awards. Most winners are determined by a mixed vote from 90% of the voting jury and 10% of fan votes.
In 1994, Canadian games journalist Geoff Keighley had been part of the first televised awards show for video games, Cybermania '94. Keighley, as a teenager, had been brought on to help write material for the celebrity hosts such as William Shatner and Leslie Nielsen. The show was not considered successful, aimed more for comedy than celebration, but he had been prompted from it to develop something akin to the Academy Awards for video games later in his career.[3]
Keighley had subsequently worked on the Spike Video Game Awards (VGA), which ran from 2003 to 2013. The show was broadcast on Spike TV near the end of each calendar year, and was designed to honor video games released during that year. Keighley served as the producer and often host for these shows. While the network had shown strong support for the award show through 2012, having brought Samuel L. Jackson to host the show, Keighley found Spike less interested in pursuing the 2013 show, partially due to the network seeking less male-oriented programming.[4] Spike opted to rename the awards from VGA to VGX as to reflect that they wanted to focus more on next-generation games that were being ushered in by the onset of the eighth generation of consoles, as well as bringing comedian Joel McHale to co-host alongside Keighley.[5] Additionally, the show was reduced to a one-hour presentation, which was first streamed online before airing on television.[4] The 2013 show was considered to be disappointing and aimed as a more commercial work rather than a celebration of video game achievements.[6] Keighley was disappointed with the change in tone that this show has presented.[3] Spike offered to continue the show in 2014, but would be limited to streaming media rather than broadcast.[4] Keighley opted to drop out from further involvement in the VGX, allowing Spike to retain ownership of the property; in November 2014, Spike TV announced that they had opted to drop the awards show in its entirety.[7]
Keighley worked with several entities within the industry, including console hardware manufacturers Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, and several large publishers, to financially back and craft a new awards show, the Game Awards, with Spike's permission.[8] He invested around US$1 million of his own personal funds to support the new show,[4] and was able to secure space at The AXIS theater in Las Vegas for hosting the live event. Without a broadcaster, Keighley and the other producers agreed to live stream the show on the consoles' networks and on Valve's Steam service to be able to reach a much larger audience than Spike TV previously had.[7]
The Game Awards
Geoff Keighley, host of the Game Awards
Since the 2014 show, Keighley has been able to secure the larger Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles to host the event. He has worked to partner with multiple streaming services around the globe for the show, which has been a move appreciated by several of the Game Awards' partners since the show's inception.[9] Keighley has been approached by broadcast networks offering to air the show, but he had refused these offers, allowing them to keep the freedom of how they present and structure the show.[10] The 2019 show included a simulcast in partnership with Sony Pictures for select Cinemark movie theaters throughout the United States.[11]The Game Awards 2020 was not held in a live theater due to the COVID-19 pandemic and was instead hosted virtually.[12] The 2021 show was held live again at the Microsoft Theater with a reduced audience due to ongoing COVID-19 precautions.[13]
An illustration of the award statuette, designed by Keighley and Weta Workshop
Keighley considered it important that the Game Awards are aimed to favorably present the interest of gamers and the industry at large, as well as being welcoming to celebrities and others that have shown interest in video games.[9] While the Game Awards are principally an awards show, Keighley knew the importance of having additional content, having seen other experiments of video game awards shows that were only dedicated to awards fail due to lack of audience.[14] Keighley believed that the Game Awards should fall somewhere between the entertainment venues that are used for the Academy Awards and the standard award presentation used for the Game Developers Choice Awards, and wanted a balance of material.[9] Through the Spike VGX and into the Game Awards, Keighley has engaged with games studios to bring reveals of new games alongside the awards. He considers the crowning moment of this approach was being able to secure the first gameplay reveal of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at the Game Awards 2014.[14] Keighly encourages game studios to provide any content that might be deemed exciting or that can pique interest, even if these games are at an early stage of development, and then makes the selection of which games and trailers to feature.[14] Keighley subsequently works with those studios about how to best position their trailers to have the most impact; for example, in the 2018 show, he and Nintendo worked on a trailer reveal for the Persona 5 character Joker in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate that appeared to start as a teaser for a new game in the series.[15][16]
Since the show's launch, Keighley has solicited input from fans on how to improve the show, typically while at trade shows and conventions in months ahead of the show. For 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic causing cancellations of many of these events, Keighley invited about one hundred fans to private chats with himself and other top organizers of the program to help solicit their input.[17] The Game Awards were still held in 2020 and 2021, though with a limited invited audience for the latter and limited interactions of hosts, presenters and nominees due to restrictions set by California and Los Angeles in regards to large gatherings in indoor spaces. The 2022 show returned to a full live audience as these government restrictions were since lifted.[18]
In conjunction with the show, digital storefronts such as Steam, Xbox Games Store, Nintendo eShop, and PlayStation Store offer the nominated games on sale leading up to and a few days after the event.[19] The statuette awarded to the selected games was designed by collaboration between Keighley and Weta Workshop. It is meant to represent "the evolution of the video game medium by way of an angel that ascends through digital building blocks".[20][21] In 2019, a Game Festival featuring demos of upcoming games was held on Steam.[22] In 2021, Keighley hosted the podcast Inside the Game Awards in partnership with Spotify.[23] In June 2023, Keighley hosted The Game Awards 10-Year Celebration, a performance of video game music at the Hollywood Bowl by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.[24]
The Game Awards has an advisory committee which includes representatives from hardware manufacturers Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and AMD, along with several game publishers. This committee selects game news organizations that are able to nominate and subsequently vote on the video games in several categories. The advisory committee otherwise does not participate in the nomination or voting process. During the nomination round, each of the news outlets provides a list of games in several categories; games for the esports-related categories are chosen by a specific subset of these outlets. The committee compiles the nominations and selects the most-nominated games for voting by these same outlets.[34] Prior to 2017, there were 28 industry experts and representatives that selected the winners, while the awards from 2017 onwards have used over 50 such experts.[35] In 2019, non-English media publications were added to the jury.[36] As of 2024, there are over one hundred media publications around the world that were chosen as juries. Winners are determined by a blended vote between the voting jury (90%) and public fan voting (10%) via social platforms and the show's website.[37]
Generally, only games released before a specific date in November are eligible for being nominated in the year's awards. As the jury must make their nominations in the weeks prior to this date, this may leave some anticipated games that are scheduled for release just before that date to be underrepresented in the nominations, since the jury must go by pre-release review copies and not the final version.[38] Any games releasing after the November deadline (which varies every year) are eligible for the next year's ceremony.[39] Game expansions, seasonal content, downloadable content, remakes, and remasters are also eligible across all award categories.[40]
Reception
The show has received praise for its announcements.[41]. However, commentators have criticized the Game Awards for being overly promotional and commercialized.[42][43][44] The ratio of time spent on honoring awards winners compared to advertisements for upcoming games is a common point of criticism.[45][46][47] After news of Activision Blizzard's sexual misconduct scandal broke, Keighley opened the 2021 awards show with a statement denouncing abuse in the industry.[48] The statement was criticized for failing to refer to Activision Blizzard by name and appearing to be designed to preserve "valuable industry relationships" over taking a more meaningful stance.[49][50] The incident raised questions about the show's close relationship with the industry and unwillingness to paint business partners in a bad light.[47] The 2023 ceremony was criticized for allowing celebrity guests several minutes to speak while winners were allocated thirty seconds before being prompted to "wrap it up" and cut off by music.[51][52][53]
^Presented as Best Mobile/Handheld Game from 2014 to 2016,[54][55][56] and split into two categories (Best Mobile Game and Best Handheld Game) in 2017[57]
^Presented as Best Score/Soundtrack in 2014 and 2015,[54][55] Best Music/Sound Design in 2016,[56] and Best Score/Music from 2017 to 2019[58][59][60]
