Trophy hunters
Once again, the real winners at The Game Awards are the viewers who tune in for a slew of new announcements
As ever, The Game Awards’ real winners are hype-seeking viewers
For all the talk of celebrating the year’s best, the evening was really about what is coming in 2019
We are starting to understand why Sony is skipping E3 next year. Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards project is five years old now, and has grown in stature to a point where it rivals the world’s biggest videogame event for new announcements. Prior to this year’s event, the 2019 release calendar was looking a little sparse. Now Keighley has shown his hand, what looked like a troubling transitional year at the fag-end of a generation now appears to be a cracker. In half a decade Keighley has, in effect, built a December version of E3.
A key element to the show’s appeal is that it is platform-agnostic, so largely free of the marketing bluster that characterises a platform holder or big publisher’s E3 conference. And since it is also an awards show, it can be positioned as a celebration of games, past, present and future. This was presumably the thinking behind an opening address delivered by PlayStation’s Shawn Layden, Xbox’s Phil Spencer and Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aimé, all sharing a stage for the first time and taking turns to eulogise the medium and those who define and consume it. It was always going to be awkward, and it certainly was, as three millionaires took turns to say how great it is that people buy games. But you have to admire the intent – and the ability to make it happen.
Despite the name, the awards themselves are something of a sideshow for the majority of those viewing (in the interests of disclosure, Edge is part of the judging panel). While Keighley and team want the event to be thought of as the Oscars of videogames, the new-game announcements are the draw, and the reason it is livestreamed to an audience of millions. The latter couldn’t help but undermine the former, meaning a chunk of categories were relegated off the main stage, either to the pre-show livestream or to segments where Keighley rattled through a few winners after one of many developer interviews. That’s preferable to the whole thing taking all night, certainly. And other awards shows do similar with perceivably less important categories. But it did reinforce the feeling that, for all the talk of celebrating the year’s best, the evening was really about what is coming in 2019 and beyond.
And there are some belters in the works. Edge readers will already know about the first signings from Private Division, the new 2K publishing label roaring out of the blocks with new games from the creators of Fallout and Assassin’s Creed. Readers of Alex Hutchinson’s column in these pages finally laid eyes on his studio Typhoon’s debut game, light-hearted sci-fi adventure Journey To The Savage Planet. There were big names, such as Ubisoft’s Far Cry New Dawn and Hello Games’ The Last Campfire – but the spotlight was also afforded to smaller studios. Simogo has long deserved a stage of this size, and thanks to new publisher Annapurna Interactive it got one for the Switch exclusive Sayonara Wild Hearts.
Arguably the headline showing was Epic Games, which in addition to hoovering up a mass of awards for Fortnite unveiled its PC game storefront. Announced a few days before the show, it offers developers far more favourable terms than the 30 per cent taken by Steam. It’s long been the industry-standard revenue deal, in fairness, but it’s obvious who Epic is trying to undercut by asking for 12 per cent of sales. With 200 million Fortnite users already using Epic’s launcher, it was off to a flyer even before it announced the first wave of games. Supergiant’s action Roguelike Hades is an Epic store exclusive, insta-launching into Early Access; Annapurna’s Dark Souls homage Ashen is there too, and beloved PlayStation exclusive Journey will follow.
Fortnite aside, the night’s big award winner was God Of War, which was named Game Of The Year. Earlier, Christopher Judge and Alastair Duncan, the voices behind Kratos and son Atreus, delivered the best gag of the night when the former told the latter to announce a winner with the line, “Read it, boy”. The awards side of the show hardly lacked for star power, though it frequently felt incongruous. The Russo brothers gave an award to Fortnite, to the delight of Epic’s Donald Mustard; Christoph Waltz was there too, with a somewhat implausible joke about mouse-and-keyboard controls (“I’m just saying, aim assist is dumb”). Jonah Hill eulogised Woody Jackson. And if there was a weirder sight in 2018 than two members of Weezer introducing a live performance of Devil May Cry 5’ s power-metal trailer anthem Devil Trigger, well, no, there wasn’t, was there.
Yet weirdest of all, it worked. Keighley’s positioning the night as a celebration of games, and the people that make, play and sell them, meant that nothing felt out of place. Everything, however weird, awkward, regrettable or brilliant, had a natural home in an event designed to celebrate an industry that is all of those things, and more besides.