Creator of the Games Awards and host Geoff Keighley has spent his life near the Hollywood-inferiority center of the video game industry. It has been linked to strange accidents in gaming culture, pageantry, and celebrity cameos dating back to Cybermania '94 where, at 15 years old, he was an “interactive product specialist” and named Jonathan Taylor Thomas Mortal Kombat game as the winner of the best overall game.
Thirty years later, Keighley has successfully channeled glitz, glamour, and Oscar-like fame in the service of celebrating an entertainment medium that has yet to grow up but may be more comfortable in its skin. uncomfortable itself. The show delivered laughs, heartfelt confessions, inspiring memories, and heaps of new big game reveals Most average people tune in for, all without major hiccups or anything collapsing under the exhausting pressure of a nearly four-hour show.
Harrison Ford was the only one who looked out of place on stage at the Peacock Theater in downtown LA last night, sandwiched awkwardly between his Indiana Jones virtual doppelganger and executive producer which gave rise to the hundred-million-dollar symbol of the action hero. . It was that memory, just like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle the best when it embraces the potential absurdity of its immersive symbols rather than the grace associated with its Spielbergian source material, gaming culture and the industry that produces it have shifted out of the shadows cast by Hollywood a long time ago, even if gaming's obsession with that old rivalry still creeps through the frame from time to time.
Keighley launched The Game Awards back in 2014 after breaking with Spike TV and ditching cable distribution for the streaming switch. The movement continued the infamous VGX 2013 disaster in which Keighley hosted a visibly bored and at times distant Joel McHale. “VGX Spike Awards Become a New Kind of Message,” read a Forbes chief from the day after.
After ditching the old format, the 2014 Game Awards were immediately overrun by the media's hyped antics about trying to get everyday people to “care” about games and the instead they aimed more specifically at the fans who already understood why they were cool, exciting, and forward. expected to change dramatically (the show took place including teases for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Or Man's Sky, The Witcher 3and 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 costumes and beginnings, giving us plenty of beautiful moments but plenty of cringe-worthy moments as well. And as gaming has grown around it, with more important people of business practices used and the toxic communities they sometimes play football with it, The Game Awards have struggled to change, walking a fine line between paying lip service to well-intentioned critics and carrying water for the companies which pays their bills and provides their World Premiere trailer.
Things came to a head last year when developers facing a spike in layoffs amid the post-covid restructuring of the gaming industry were told to “cover up” until an apparently about celebrating people's achievements back to throwing away their range of sponsors. game ads. Better to catch the disagreement At the time when Swen Vinckeaccepting the award for the best game of 2023 on behalf of the Baldur's Gate 3 team, was rushed off stage amid attempts to dedicate the award to colleagues who had died during development.
Keighley is an insider, collecting and preserving· make sure people know that he got to play, see, or hear about them months before anyone else. It's a joy it's really spun into authenticity. But the host has also shown an unwavering commitment to him getting feedback and criticismeven if his ideas sometimes sounded in the moment tone-deaf and small.
And just like the inaugural ceremony ten years ago, The Game Awards 2024 seemed to be partly a response to the previous year's failures. Winners got more time to talk, if only a little more. No one was seen being rushed off the stage. Even though half of the winners were announced in speedrun rounds between commercials for other games, many still had the chance to be seen accepting their awards. Winners being seen and celebrated, anyway, seems to be what every award show is about, even if it's the least they can aim for.
Rather than being launched against greed or the excesses of the video game industry amid one of the worst years for layoffs in the history of the show (and the industry), Keighley conceded the floor to Amir Satvatdevelopment director at Tencent Games, to honor his personal contributions to his industry peers through his hard work documenting industry layoffs, updating a strong list of new job openings, and simply ' to remind other developers when their life is over, no matter how small. the project they were working on or how insecure the game studio that hired them is, there is someone there, testifying and ready to help. It wasn't a radical call for union, but this is the closest Keighley's show has come to reckoning with the destructive side of the brands he worships.
And of course the event brought the big announcements that fans have been loving. They got the first taste of The Witcher 4 and look at what the last of us The creator Naughty Dog has been working on it for years. Legends of Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) and Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry, Bayonetta) to announce new projects. There was more Elden Circle (three-player roguelike dynamic), Borders (new trailer for Limits 4), and Helldivers 2 download (free update adds a whole new enemy group).
I haven't mentioned much about the actual award winners themselves because they are never that good. All the games mentioned were more deserving. While a culture full of leaderboards and scores favors a winner, the event is still, first and foremost, about celebrating games through sheer force of spectacle. Video game music played in orchestra halls brings more than a little of the old video game inferiority complex at work, but seeing Balatro music performed live on stage in front of starving artists and CEOs alike amazing time though.
And catharsis came with the introduction to the GOTY winner. Vincke, returning from last year's victory to present the award to this year's winner while sporting a cease-fire pin, explained the comments he didn't quite get to make at a show than last year. In his introduction, he outlined his formula for GOTY success amid an industry of rising costs, unsustainable profit motives, and endless incentives to copy someone else's homework instead of trying something new.
The studios that made games that deserved such an award said, “Their developers didn't treat it like numbers on a spreadsheet. They didn't treat their players like consumers to take advantage of. And they didn't make decisions they knew were short-sighted in terms of bonus or politics. They knew that if you put the game and the team first, the revenue would follow. They were driven by idealism, and they wanted players to have fun, and they realized that if the developers didn't have fun, no one would. “
This year was the best The Game Awards has been in a while, if not the best it can be yet. Why is the reward for access still relegated to the pre-show? How come so many of the departments are still such a mess? Why the real prizes are still taking less than 10 percent of the show's total running time? How come the finances surrounding the show, unlike its voting process, remain so unclear? There's always next year, because as the viewer numbers prove time and time again, we'll all be watching when the circus returns to town next December.
My personal favorite part of the show was the recurring pieces with Muppets Statler and Waldorf. In fact they voiced the most common online jabs launched at Keighley in real time. Ever willing to please, the showman took them on the chin instead of introducing the humor by trying to come back funny. Perhaps he has learned that the best guests are also willing punching bags for everyone else's complaints. And the games industry has a lot of them, rightly so.
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