The frontrunners for Game of the Year have seldom been less clear

polygon.com:

This is a strange year in gaming. We knew it would be like this, but it’s still strange. The industry is seeing record layoffs in tandem with widespread game cancellations and cuts to development budgets. The release schedule for major games is sparse. PlayStation, as a first-party publisher, is kind of sitting this one out. Nintendo’s Switch 2 (or whatever it will be called) has reportedly been delayed into 2025. Xbox is, bewilderingly, both a dominant publisher and a fading hardware platform at the same time. Publishers and developers are struggling with ballooning development time and budgets.

The lack of major video game releases is particularly evident in the time-honored ritual of game-of-the-year (or GOTY) discussion, a hobbyist’s hobby within the gaming community. We’re well past the halfway point of 2024 already and no consensus is forming at all, either around already-released games or forthcoming titles.

But, hang on — why are we talking about this, anyway?

Other entertainment industries, especially the movie industry, devote months of their annual calendar, millions of dollars, and huge amounts of energy to the awards season; the community around an artform, from artists to critics to audiences, gets together to debate and celebrate the best that artform has to offer. It’s competitive, often silly, deeply commercialized, and usually structured around one big awards-giving event — in film’s case, the Oscars — that hands out the final accolades according to a relatively narrow definition of taste. But this circus serves an important purpose too: it stimulates conversation, promotes good art, and gives businesses more reason to make good things.

In games, things are a little different. GOTY is a diffuse idea; everyone has their own pick. There’s no structured season of awards ceremonies to speak of. Hundreds if not thousands of publications like Polygon deliberate on their choices according to their own criteria. Publicists appreciate awards, but aren’t