Astro Bot’s GOTY win was safe, predictable, and deserved

As we predicted, Astro Bot won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2024. This was a relatively open race, with no runaway front-runner, which gave the 2024 awards a little extra frisson of excitement. But in reality, Team Asobi’s delightful platformer was perfectly placed to take an easy route down the middle to gaming’s top prize. Astro Bot took home four awards — it also won Best Game Direction, Best Action/Adventure Game, and Best Family Game — making it the biggest winner of the night.

While some awards-watchers will be disappointed — Chinese action game Black Myth: Wukong and indie card game Balatro in particular had vocal supporters — it’s a win few will have deep objections to. And that’s precisely why it prevailed. Impeccably polished, infectiously joyful, and 100% uncontroversial, Astro Bot was the one 2024 game everyone could agree on.

That’s not to say its win has no element of surprise to it at all. Games nominated in the Family category rarely win Game of the Year; the only other time it’s happened was when It Takes Two took the top prize in 2021. The Game Awards voting jury generally prefers games aimed at an adult audience, with more “mature” themes and presentation. The jury also favors games with strong narrative elements, which Astro Bot just doesn’t have. But it’s worth pointing out that It Takes Two is a friendly co-op platform game about divorce, and that Astro Bot, as well as appealing to children with its adorable characters and cheerfully anarchic vibe, appeals to nostalgic gamers with its heavily promoted, highly collectable celebration of 30 years of PlayStation. There’s a sentimental and emotive appeal to adults inherent in both games — more so than in, say, Super Mario Bros. Wonder — and this might have helped Astro Bot strike a deeper chord in the voting jury’s hearts.

All the same, it’s cheering to see such high acclaim for a title that aims to be inclusive to some of gaming’s most overlooked and underserved constituents: children. All those deep-cut references to obscure 1990s Japan-only releases might get fanboys in the feels, but they’re no obstacle to an innocent, face-value enjoyment of a video game that is relentlessly creative and just extremely fun to play. (Just ask my 8-year-old, who’s rolled credits on Astro Bot three times already.)

In all other ways, Astro Bot is a classic GOTY winner. It’s a technically dazzling console game with high production values. It got great reviews and built up a formidable level of critical consensus. And it has an approachable, nonspecific universality that can easily cross cultural barriers to reach every corner of the international TGA jury.

All the other nominees had a significant asterisk against their names. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree was hamstrung by its status as an expansion, even before the public outcry over its nomination. Black Myth: Wukong had tremendous international and popular support, but it is just not a critics’ game, and the last 10 years have shown us time and again that only games with broad critical support (in other words, a high Metacritic rating) will prevail.

It was tempting to spin a narrative around Balatro’s chances, especially after we at Polygon selected it as our own game of the year. It had the reviews, and by indie standards, it was very widely played. But it’s time for a reality check. The last time an indie game appeared to seriously challenge for Game of the Year at The Game Awards was Hades’ run in 2020. It claimed many high-profile outlets’ GOTY titles that year, and some of us professed shock when it lost to The Last of Us Part 2. But a look at this handy global tracker of game-of-the-year titles — tracking games that either won GOTY awards or topped journalistic outlets’ end-of-year lists — tells the sobering true story. The Last of Us Part 2 was named game of the year 326 times to Hades’ 75. It wasn’t even remotely close. Appreciation for indie games that considers them on the same level as AAA titles exists only within a certain bubble, and there remains no way a game like Balatro can build the broad coalition of support needed for a GOTY win at The Game Awards. It’s just not happening. Still, Balatro developer LocalThunk can go home delighted with three awards, tying for second place behind Astro Bot.

Astro Bot’s closest challenger ought to have been Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, another shiny console game with broad appeal. But Rebirth’s lunch was eaten by Atlus’ Metaphor: ReFantazio, a niche but similarly epic role-playing game that, in the end, just had a bit more gravitas, a bit more critical cred. Metaphor’s three wins, and its triumph over Rebirth in the Best Role-Playing Game category, suggest that it was likely second place to Astro Bot in terms of GOTY votes.

Astro Bot’s win cements Sony’s position as the most successful publisher in the history of The Game Awards. It now has three GOTY wins to its name, more than any other publisher. (EA has two, Nintendo has one, and Microsoft has none.) Sony also topped the table of total award wins for an unparalleled fourth time, with Astro Bot’s four wins supplemented by a further two for Helldivers 2. Not bad for a company that warned at the start of the year that it had no major exclusive games coming in 2024.

Although The Game Awards is unquestionably the most prestigious event in gaming’s awards season, it’s also one of the earliest — a contrast with film awards, which climax with the Oscars after a monthslong round of so-called precursors. So does Astro Bot’s TGA win herald a processional sweep for Team Asobi through the rest of the big awards in the coming months? Not necessarily. The industry DICE Awards often follow TGA’s lead, but the U.K.’s BAFTA Games Awards has only gone the same way as TGA twice, and it prides itself on picking less well-known titles like Returnal and Outer Wilds in its Best Game category. Maybe there’s an opening for Balatro there.

For now, though, The Game Awards has done what it does best: pick a mainstream consensus winner that everyone can be OK with. I mean, just look at li’l Astro, his cute waddling limbs, his adorable blinking LEDs. You wouldn’t deny him a little silverware, would you?