The Flawed Game Awards Delivered Its Best Show In Years

The Game Awards creator and host Geoff Keighley has spent his life in the vicinity of the video game industry’s Hollywood-inferiority complex. He’s been attached to weird collisions of gaming culture, pageantry, and celebrity cameos dating back to Cybermania ‘94 where, at 15 years old, he was an “interactive product specialist” and Jonathan Taylor Thomas announced Mortal Kombat as the winner of best overall game.

Thirty years later, Keighley’s succeeded at marshaling Oscar-like glitz, glamour, and prestige in service of celebrating an entertainment medium that’s still not entirely grown up but may be more comfortable in its own uncomfortable skin. The show delivered laughs, heartfelt acknowledgements, stirring commemorations, and heaps of the big new game reveals most average people tune in for, all without any major hiccups or anything collapsing under the exhausting weight of a nearly four-hour ceremony.

The only one who looked out of place up onstage at the Peacock Theater in downtown L.A. last night was Harrison Ford, wedged awkwardly between his virtual Indiana Jones doppelganger and the executive producer who willed the hundred-million-dollar simulacrum of the action hero into existence. It was a reminder that, just as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle excels most when it’s embracing the potential absurdity of its immersive sim antics rather than the relative grace of its Spielbergian source material, gaming culture and the industry that produces it have long since moved out of the shadow cast by Hollywood, even if gaming’s obsession with that old rivalry still pokes through the frame every once in a while.

Keighley launched The Game Awards back in 2014 after breaking with Spike TV and ditching cable distribution for the streaming revolution. The move followed the infamous 2013 VGX disaster in which Keighley hosted alongside a visibly bored and at times belligerently aloof Joel McHale. “Spike’s VGX Awards Evolve Into A New Kind of Mess,” read a Forbes headline from the day after.

After ditching the old format, 2014's Game Awards was immediately unburdened by legacy media’s condescending antics around trying to get everyday people to “care” about games and instead took aim more squarely at the fans who already understood why they were cool, exciting, and on the cusp of radically evolving (the show happened to include teases for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, No Man’s Sky, The Witcher 3, and other modern standard bearers).

But the modern Game Awards were not built in a day or even a year. The event changed and grew in fits and starts, giving us plenty of beautiful moments but lots of cringe-worthy ones as well. And as gaming has matured around it, with people more critical of exploitative industry practices and the toxic communities they occasionally play footsies with, The Game Awards have struggled to adapt, walking a fine line between paying lip service to good-faith critiques and carrying water for the companies that pay its bills and provide its World Premiere trailer reveals.

Things came to a head last year when developers facing a spike in layoffs amid the gaming industry’s post-covid reshuffling were told to “wrap it up” so that an event ostensibly about celebrating people’s achievements could get back to plugging away at its slate of sponsored game ads. The dissonance was best captured in the moment when Swen Vincke, accepting the award for best game of 2023 on behalf of the Baldur’s Gate 3 team, was rushed off stage amid efforts to dedicate the award to colleagues who had passed away during development.

Keighley is an insider’s insider, carefully collecting and curating surprise game announcements and always making sure people know that he got to play, see, or hear about them months before anyone else. It’s a fanboyishness he’s deftly spun into authenticity. But the host has also demonstrated an unrelenting commitment to soaking up feedback and criticism, even if his reactions in the moment sometimes sound tone-deaf and petty.

And just like the inaugural ceremony a decade ago, The Game Awards 2024 seemed like a reaction in part to the previous year’s failings. Winners were given more time to speak, if only a little bit extra. No one was visibly rushed off the stage. Even if half of the winners were announced in speedrun rounds between ads for other games, many still got a chance to be seen accepting their awards. Winners being seen and celebrated is, ostensibly, anyway, what all award shows are about, even if it’s the bare minimum of what they can aspire to.

Rather than launch into a screed against the video game industry’s greed or excess amid one of the worst years for layoffs in the show’s (and the industry’s) history, Keighley ceded the floor to Amir Satvat, a development director at Tencent Games, to honor his personal contributions to his industry peers through his tireless work documenting industry layoffs, updating a robust list of new job openings, and simply reminding other developers that when their life is upended, no matter how small the project they were working on or how unheard of the game studio that employed them is, there’s someone there, bearing witness and ready to offer help. It was not a radical call for unionization, but it is the closest Keighley’s show has come to reckoning with the destructive side of the brands it worships.

And of course the event brought the big announcements fans have been eager for. They got their first taste of The Witcher 4 and a peek at what The Last of Us maker Naughty Dog has been working on for years. Legends Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) and Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry, Bayonetta) revealed new projects. There was more Elden Ring (a three-player roguelike spin-off), Borderlands (a new trailer for Borderlands 4), and Helldivers 2 (a free update adding an entirely new enemy faction).

I haven’t mentioned the actual winners of the awards themselves much because they are never quite the point. Every game nominated was more than worthy. While a culture steeped in leaderboards and score chases loves a winner, the event remains, first and foremost, about commemorating games through the sheer force of spectacle. Video game music being played in orchestra halls has more than a whiff of the old video game inferiority complex at work, but seeing Balatro music played live on a stage in front starving artists and CEOs alike is an incredible moment nonetheless.

And catharsis did come with the introduction to the GOTY winner. Vincke, returning from last year’s win to present the award to this year’s victor while sporting a ceasefire pin, elaborated on the remarks he didn’t quite get to give at last year’s show. In his preamble, he laid out his formula for GOTY success amid an industry of rising costs, insatiable profit motives, and endless incentives to copy someone else’s homework instead of try something new.

The studios that made games deserving of such an award, he said, “didn’t treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet. They didn’t treat their players as users to exploit. And they didn’t make decisions they knew were short-sighted in function of a bonus or politics. They knew that if you put the game and the team first, the revenue will follow. They were driven by idealism, and wanted players to have fun, and they realized that if the developers didn’t have fun, nobody was going to have any fun.”

This year was the best The Game Awards has been in a while, if not the best it can still be. Why is the award for accessibility still relegated to the pre-show? How come so many of the categories are still such a mess? Why do the actual awards still take up less than 10 percent of the show’s total run time? How come the finances around the show, unlike its voting process, are still all so opaque? There’s always next year, because as the viewership stats prove time and again, we will all be watching when the circus comes back to town next December.

My personal favorite part of the show was the recurring bits by Muppets Statler and Waldorf. They essentially voiced the most common online jabs launched at Keighley in real time. Ever eager to please, the showman took them on the chin rather than undercutting the humor by attempting a witty retort. Perhaps he’s learned that the best hosts are also willing punching bags for everyone else’s grievances. And the gaming industry, rightfully, has a lot of them.

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