[GoLLuM13]

@DoctorEldritch and then you have cases like Hogwarts Legacy that was the best seller in its year but haven't even been nominated because of... 👀


For this FF7 I think they hesitated between 2 games, so they gave the GOTY to one and a lot of awards to the other, something similar happened to Elden Ring and God of War Ragnarok

[DoctorEldritch]

@GoLLuM13 Goes to show that it may be more political and shoulder-rubbing nowadays. Then again, not sure if any award in the world is truly objective anyway...

But at least there is entertainment value, and I guess that may be the main point behind all this now.

[GoLLuM13]

@DoctorEldritch Like any piece of art, we all have our biases that comes into place, but sometimes there is a little something more, but I won't make any accusation without proof 👀

[DoctorEldritch]

@GoLLuM13 That makes me contemplate the similarities between art and games. I want to say that because games are by intention more commercialised than typical art, they may be more subjected to biases and planned awards and all those things, the money involved is big enough to warrant it. The more money the industry is, the less objectivity its awards may arguably have. But this may be my personal pessimistic opinion.

[GoLLuM13]

@DoctorEldritch I think you are right, and Games are indeed part of art and involve a lot of money, and share similarities, with other forms of art like movies and songs

[DoctorEldritch]

@GoLLuM13 The Game Awards is like the Oscars now, I guess. I wonder if there is an award that is more objective out there, sort of "by the gamers for the gamers" with limited or no impact from the industry itself at all. If there is, I do not know it.

[GoLLuM13]

@DoctorEldritch The Game Awards has this category "Players' Voice Award" but I don't know how objective it is (we all have our biases and preferences after all, the only difference is that, in our case, no money is involved 😜)

[DoctorEldritch]

@GoLLuM13 They do, but it's only one out of many. If I didn't know any better, I'd think that this is a "trophy award", there so that the organisers could say "Look, we're fair and objective!". But, of course, The Game Awards has no need to do that, they are a paragon of transparency 😉

It's funny in the sense that, technically, players are where most of the money is coming from, when you get down to it. In the end, the most important indicator of success for a game is how much money it makes, not how many awards it gets.

[GoLLuM13]

@DoctorEldritch indeed, if I was doing I would like to have this "trophy" of most sold game of the year 😜

[DoctorEldritch]

@GoLLuM13 I wonder why there isn't one, even if not part of The Game Awards. That would be interesting. I mean, not all game-selling platform requires you to actually buy the game to review it, Steam does not, for example, which sparks controversies on occasion, but that's a separate story.

The point is that average reviews may not be truly representative of game-selling platforms as well, and I do not think that there is a centralised data collection of the financial performance of games. We may get glimpses of it when and if individual companies choose to share it, like X game sold Y copies of X game generated Y revenue, but that's about it.

I mean, I get it, sometimes developers and publishers want to conceal that information if it could be used against them on a corporate level or if this information may damage future sales (if a game is selling badly now and people know it, they may less likely want to buy it in the future). And other times games may pay for themselves even years after their release. Like HoMM, for example. But I wish there was a more centralised and transparent system for game finance figures still. That insight could be illuminating.