UPDATE 1: Added 2023 nominations and changed relevant data.
If you care to read it, here's a bit of a disclaimer first:
I made this because I enjoyed doing so. Frankly, I got a bit overwhelmed with games like Starfield, Baldur's Gate 3 and Armored Core VI all vying for my attention, so with multiple long Youtube videos to catch up on in the background, I figured I'd do something else I enjoy doing. Which, in this case, was making a mostly-useless breakdown of a statistic most people won't care about. This isn't new for me. When Nintendo was taking their sweet time putting out a Direct in 2019/2020, I created a big-ass unnecessary table detailing just how much Nintendo was taking their time. A table immortalised in an old GameXplain video here. So, please, I'd ask that you don't question whether I was 'OK' in making this, because frankly it was really relaxing for me to do. The alternative was probably just mindless Tik-Tok scrolling anyway.
As for the subject matter, this isn't any attempt to comment on who I personally want to win at this year's GOTYs, or disregard anyone's favourite genre or games. It is merely a statistical look at the types of games that get nominated for, or win, the GOTY award at The Game Awards. What kinds of games they are, what platforms they're on, who they're made by, and so on. If you're wondering, I think Baldur's Gate 3 is likely going to take the win this year.
Also, feel free to use this whenever you want in the future if you, say, are betting on who might win, or are wanting to win an internet argument :)
So, without further ado:
I have created a comprehensive table detailing a number of key statistics surrounding the games which have won/been nominated for the GOTY Awards at Geoff Keighley's yearly event, The Game Awards. The table can be seen below:
Some explanations for why I made things the way they were:
Now... what can we discern from this? Well, there's a couple of key points I took away:
So the day has come for all this data to finally be a bit useful! I've updated the table and (relevant) data to include the 2023 nominations, ready to be updated further when the winners come in:
Oh, and I don't think Alan Wake 2 will win, but editing borders in Excel is a pain in the arse so I left the 'GOTY Winner' dashed line there.
So some highlights:
So, yeah. Bring on the awards!
- 2023 has the highest average OC score of every year!
- The sheer domination of 3rd Person and/or Action-Adventure games only grows larger, unsurprisingly.
- Nintendo is now the most-nominated developer and nearly the most-nominated publisher. Of course Nintendo as a 'developer' is many teams, but I'm just going by what they're advertised as.
- Mad congratulations to Larian for being the only newcomer in either publisher or nomination this year!
- Baldur's Gate 3's platform and MC review situation is definitely a weird one, as it hasn't really 'fully' finished with either yet.
If you care to read it, here's a bit of a disclaimer first:
I made this because I enjoyed doing so. Frankly, I got a bit overwhelmed with games like Starfield, Baldur's Gate 3 and Armored Core VI all vying for my attention, so with multiple long Youtube videos to catch up on in the background, I figured I'd do something else I enjoy doing. Which, in this case, was making a mostly-useless breakdown of a statistic most people won't care about. This isn't new for me. When Nintendo was taking their sweet time putting out a Direct in 2019/2020, I created a big-ass unnecessary table detailing just how much Nintendo was taking their time. A table immortalised in an old GameXplain video here. So, please, I'd ask that you don't question whether I was 'OK' in making this, because frankly it was really relaxing for me to do. The alternative was probably just mindless Tik-Tok scrolling anyway.
As for the subject matter, this isn't any attempt to comment on who I personally want to win at this year's GOTYs, or disregard anyone's favourite genre or games. It is merely a statistical look at the types of games that get nominated for, or win, the GOTY award at The Game Awards. What kinds of games they are, what platforms they're on, who they're made by, and so on. If you're wondering, I think Baldur's Gate 3 is likely going to take the win this year.
Also, feel free to use this whenever you want in the future if you, say, are betting on who might win, or are wanting to win an internet argument :)
So, without further ado:
I have created a comprehensive table detailing a number of key statistics surrounding the games which have won/been nominated for the GOTY Awards at Geoff Keighley's yearly event, The Game Awards. The table can be seen below:
Some explanations for why I made things the way they were:
- I used OpenCritic scores as they collate all the platforms together under one number, making my job a fair bit easier. Whilst many titles on the list have received ports in their futures (e.g. God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn), they generally did not affect the OC score to a considerable degree. That is with the sole exception of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, whose atrocious late 2018 Xbox One port plummeted its 86 OC score to a 77. In that case, I decided to stick with the game's original PC review scores.
- For the same reason, I chose to use MC review counts for the 'No. of Reviews' field. The Game Awards Jury, of course, can only vote on the game as it was in the year of its release, so only counting the reviews for the platforms found within the year of launch (mostly at launch, with the exception of MH: World's late PC Port) made sense. Same logic applies for why I only counted the 1st year platforms in that column.
- Whilst I personally disagreed with some of them (e.g. Bayonetta 2 being 'Action Adventure') I felt that Wikipedia was the most 'objective' place to take genres from.
- The GOTY Consensus Date is based on https://www.gameawards.net/ for pre-2021. Didn't really need to look at 2022 because, well, it's Elden Ring.
- In the case of Smash Ultimate's 'Perspective', I chose 'Fighter' instead of 2D as I felt that collating a 2D Fighter with Side-Scrolling Platformers/Metroidvanias wasn't the right way to look at it.
Now... what can we discern from this? Well, there's a couple of key points I took away:
- When it comes to the genre and perspectives found in GOTY nominees/winners, 3rd Person Action Adventure games are overwhelming in how much they dominant the nominee lists.
- Unsurprisingly, multiplat games are dominant in terms of nominations, with Playstation exclusives and Switch exclusives coming 2nd and 3rd respectively. Unfortunately, no Xbox (or, later, Xbox/PC) exclusives saw any nominations. Perhaps we'll see the first with Starfield this year.
- FromSoftware is a beast of a developer, with 4 nominations and the title of being the only development team to take home 2 GOTY wins
- Sony Interactive Entertainment is a beast of a publisher, with a wide lead in the amount of nominations they've recieved for their games.
- An OC ranking of 88 is by far the most common ranking for nominees. So... if your review thread ends up with an '88', you can be happy knowing that such a score is still objectively "GOTY nominee," material.
- Generally, what The Game Awards picks for their GOTY is both the same as the consensus, and different from that year's highest scorer. This could be explained by the genre discrepancies seen above; of the 8 disrepancies, 6 are of games in genres and platforms not commonly seen within the nominee/winner pools (Racing, VR, Horror, Platforming, Indie RPG, Fighting).
- It is rare that the game with the fewest reviews on MC gets the win, implying a correlation between how many reviewers dealt with a game, and its likelihood to win/be nominated. The exception being It Takes Two.
- Every GOTY winner, unsurprisingly, also wins in its dedicated genre categories as well. However, being nominated for GOTY does not guarantee a category win.
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