Indiana Jones would’ve been a GOTY contender if not for timing

The Game Awards has a cutoff date for eligibility — Nov. 22 this year. To qualify for consideration, games must be publicly available by a date in mid-to-late November — usually late enough to catch all the year’s major releases, but occasionally something significant slips through the net. And it turns out that this year, a major Game of the Year contender has escaped consideration.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was released on Dec. 9 to immediate acclaim. Eurogamer gave it a rare five-star rating; PC Gamer said it “joins Batman Arkham and Goldeneye in the god tier of licensed games”; Noclip’s Danny O’Dwyer said it was “my favorite game of 2024 and I’m absolutely shocked by this.” When “GOTY” started trending on X this week, surely in anticipation of The Game Awards on Dec. 12, many of the posts mentioned MachineGames’ take on the legendary movie hero — even though it’ll have no representation at the show, nor is it nominated in any of the categories.

It’s not just guesswork to say that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would almost certainly have been nominated for TGA’s top Game of the Year award. Metacritic is a very strong indicator of success at The Game Awards; its ratings are derived by polling a broad range of international review outlets, which is similar to how TGA’s voting jury works.

On Metacritic, Great Circle’s Metascore sits at 87 (and it’s a rare case of critics and users being in total agreement — its user score is 8.7 as well). This score doesn’t put the game in the top tier of 2024 releases; Astro Bot, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree all have a 94 Metascore, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is at 92. But it is higher than anything else in the AAA action-adventure and role-playing genres that TGA’s jury overwhelmingly favors for Game of the Year — including the GOTY-nominated Black Myth: Wukong, which has a score of just 81.

It’s true that The Game Awards rarely favors licensed games. But in every other sense, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a perfect TGA game. It’s strong on storytelling and it’s performance-led, with TGA favorite Troy Baker taking the starring role. It’s technically advanced and has lavish production values. It’s a classic action-adventure game with heart (and puzzles).

Polygon canvassed a few members of the voting jury, too, asking whether they would have included the game in their nomination ballot for Game of the Year if it had been eligible. While this was by all means anecdotal, the responses were striking: They varied from “probably” to “almost certainly” to “absolutely.”

With great reviews and broad appeal, it seems very likely that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would have been nominated for GOTY, probably at the expense of Black Myth or Shadow of the Erdtree. A GOTY win would have been unlikely, with several games with even stronger reviews in competition. But the game would have been competitive in other categories, too, notably Best Performance, where Baker would have been a front-runner in a slightly soft year.

Great Circle is eligible for The Game Awards in 2025, but it will be tough for it to stay front-of-mind for the jury for 12 whole months that will be packed with massive new contenders like Grand Theft Auto 6 and Civilization 7. MachineGames, Bethesda, and their paymasters at Xbox doubtless had their reasons for picking a December release date for Indy — reasons that probably outweighed a chance at a trophy. But Xbox leadership is keenly aware of the status gap between itself and Sony (a regular GOTY winner), and might rue just missing the deadline for one of the best chances it’s had in recent years to give its rival a run for its money.