Developers are wanting more than The Game Awards are delivering

theverge.com:

Game developers have a problem with this year’s Game Awards.

While the awards part of Geoff Keighley’s Game Awards has increasingly become vestigial to the ads, teases, and trailers for games both out and coming soon, this year, that disparity was more keenly felt.

“Every year, [The Game Awards] seems to be becoming more and more a platform for revenue for its production house rather than a celebration of game development,” said Nazih Fares, head of communication and localization at The 4 Winds Entertainment and member of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) board of directors, in a statement to The Verge.

“The speed-running through awards was flat out insulting, and only giving the actual devs 30 seconds to speak while prioritizing Hollywood actors being on stage was so gross,” Kayla Glover, a game producer at Bungie, told The Verge.

The Game Awards isn’t the only video game award show in existence; it’s not even the video game equivalent of the Oscars or the Emmys. That distinction arguably belongs to the DICE Awards, which is organized by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, a nonprofit professional organization analogous to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) or the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS) — the professional academies that oversee the Oscars and the Emmys, respectively.

There are also the BAFTA Games Awards, the Golden Joystick Awards, the Game Developers Choice awards, and a host of smaller, regionally focused award shows.

But The Game Awards eclipses all of these shows by several orders of magnitude.

This year’s VOD has already racked 6.5 million views since its December 7th premiere. In contrast, the 26th annual DICE Awards VOD, posted in February