The Game Awards finally figured out its formula

digitaltrends.com:

For the past 10 years, The Game Awards has struggled to perfect its secret formula. Geoff Keighley’s annual gala has always tried to blend a traditional awards show like the Oscars with an E3 press conference. That’s historically led to mixed results. Last year’s show was especially a low point for the experiment, as award recipients were rushed off stage as quickly as possible in order to squeeze in a deluge of exhausting gameplay trailers. As I left Los Angeles’ Peacock Theater last year, I feared that it was all downhill from here.

I walked away from this year’s ceremony singing a very different tune. Keighley delivered what might have been the best stage show he’s organized since he became gaming’s go-to event planner. The show delivered non-truncated speeches, dazzling musical performances, and some genuinely show-stopping game reveals. It was an event constructed to prove that The Game Awards will be here for another 10 years, whether you like it or not.

Don’t wrap it up

It was hard to gauge just how successful this year’s ceremony would be heading into it, as the build-up was dotted with pain points. Some were par for the course, like a predictable nominee field that featured puzzling exclusions in categories like Best Mobile Game and Best Sports/Racing Game. Others felt like long-standing problems with the show’s format reaching a boiling point. That could be seen in this year’s Players’ Choice race, the show’s fan-voted category. After a few rounds of elimination-style voting, the final five included three free-to-play gacha titles. That list included Genshin Impact, a game that has a history of incentivizing players to vote by dangling in-game rewards in front of them, something that’s seemingly become standard practice for games like it. It was hard to shake the feeling that the awards