Hogwarts Legacy
The Game Awards, for better or worse, gives almost all of its nominating and award-giving power to its panel of industry figure judges, but there’s one award that is entirely fan voted, and it’s a chance to hand a TGA to something that may have been overlooked. Or it might overlap with something that wins GOTY because well, everyone thinks it’s GOTY. That would be the Player’s Choice Award.
In this case, we have now made it through one round of voting ahead of next week’s show, which has cut the total nominee count down to ten. Two more rounds will get it to one, which will be announced at The Game Awards themselves. We have seen many developers petitioning fans to vote for them, as like it or not, landing a TGA has become a somewhat big deal in the industry.
So, here are the ten games that have made the cut, which include some huge hits and some “overlooked” ones. I am not sure if this is the ranking order in terms of how many votes they have gotten, or if it’s random, but this is how they’re presented on the site.
It is not terribly shocking that 5 of the 6 actual GOTY nominees are on this list. If you’re looking for the missing one, that would be Super Mario Wonder, which did not survive the cut, despite being on the hugely popular Switch. While I know it was good, the conversation about that game has been mostly drowned out by others, so I’m not surprised to see fans skipping over it here.
Genshin Impact
Of note, we have two massively popular HoYoverse games, Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, two games that are poised to blow past others in this category due to the sheer size of their playerbases, and possibly even end up winning that way. Last year, for instance, Genshin Impact won. In 2021, it was Halo Infinite, which is a genuine surprise, I have to say. Before that, Ghost of Tsushima in 2020, nice to see as it was my personal GOTY that year.
Other than that, I’d say the two games that “need” the award the most due to a lack of many or any other nominations would be Lies of P, which has attracted quite a fanbase, and Hogwarts Legacy, what appears like it will be the top-selling game of the entire year, which reviewed well but was nominated for zero awards. There is likely some mix of fans genuinely sad and confused that it wasn’t nominated for anything (admittedly it was an extremely tough year, and 4/6 GOTY nominees are in its Action-Adventure category) but also some voting as a “protest” given the theory that the game journalist nominators are avoiding giving the game any praise due to its association with JK Rowling and her past transphobic comments.
My own personal pick is Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, where 2077 was my Game of the Year and I gave Phantom Liberty a 10/10. So yeah, I think my vote is pretty set. What about yours?
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