Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree shouldn't be eligible for Game of the Year

gamesradar.com:

The nominees for The Game Awards 2024 are here, and there's already a controversy brewing. Alongside the five excellent games tipped for Game of the Year that actually released in 2024 sits Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, an expansion to a game that released in 2022. An undeniably excellent piece of DLC, its inclusion in a list of the best games of the year feels misplaced, and even borderline disrespectful.

Geoff Keighley laid the groundwork for this decision last week, when he confirmed that expansions and re-releases would be eligible at The Game Awards. That's not necessarily new – Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty was a leading nominee at last year's show, despite the base game releasing in 2020. But of its five nods (including community support and best performer for Idris Elba), only one – Best Narrative – was in a traditional 'Best' category. That's perhaps not a nomination I would have made myself, but there's a rationale behind it that I'm prepared to accept – putting a narrative-heavy, somewhat-standalone expansion forward for a narrative award makes sense.

But for me, for this award, Shadow of the Erdtree doesn't fit within that rationale. Much like Phantom Liberty's narrative nod, the argument that its level of craft might warrant nomination for Best Game Direction is one that I can live with. But to even do that ignores the argument at the center of this entire debate: Shadow of the Erdtree is an expansion, not a game, and the game that it's an expansion to did not come out in 2024. To name it a potential 'game of the year' is a contradiction that not only struggles to make sense, but also risks subverting the whole point of having a game of the year in the first place.

Plenty of people don't play the best games of a given year in the same 12-month period that they came out in. If we're prepared to look back two full years to find a Game of the Year contender, what's to stop that line from blurring more? What's to stop the gap from stretching further