God Of War won several awards, and Red Dead Redemption 2 walked away with nothing, despite several nominations. That's just insane if you ask me. I loved God Of War, but Red Dead should have picked up something, it's an absolute masterpiece.
Music is easily the most disappointing aspect of the GoW reboot for me. I know that we're living in difficult times as far as video game OSTs are concerned, but color me confused on that one.
These ceremonies have a tendency of only focusing on a narrow range of genres / forms of expression, just like the Oscars. Looking at the list of nominees, it's mostly huge western AAA and the latest indies.
I've stopped paying much attention to this stuff, quite frankly. It's little more than the opinion of a handful of people based on a bunch of arbitrary rules and yet it's being elevated to a weird cult status or "objective measure of quality".
Looking at the history of the BAGAs over the years, not only did they completely skip 2005 games (!), but there are also some pretty blatant recurring blind spots among the nominees.
Stanshall wrote: ↑April 5th, 2019, 10:35 am
Err, they missed PSYVARIAR DELTA.
Suits wrote: ↑April 5th, 2019, 10:25 am
Makes perfect sense if you ask me.
The beauty of opinion and preference.
KSubzero1000 wrote: ↑April 5th, 2019, 10:25 am
I've stopped paying much attention to this stuff, quite frankly. It's little more than the opinion of a handful of people based on a bunch of arbitrary rules and yet it's being elevated to a weird cult status or "objective measure of quality".
Oh yeah, I mean of course it doesn't really mean anything, but I was still surprised RDR2 didn't pick up anything. Even for music or narrative. Even the art in the game was amazing, the diversity of the landscapes is something I don't think I've seen before, and certainly not on such a scale.
God of War seems a bit over-represented, but overall I don't have much of a problem with it winning a lot of stuff. It deserves it. And I'm not sure exactly what the time window of eligibility was for these, but there wasn't really much else released around the same time that stood much of a chance.
Although I don't think it really deserves an award for Audio Achievement or Soundtrack. For the former there wasn't anything else up for nomination that would have been better. For the latter, maybe Celeste would have been more deserving. The performance section looks a bit silly having God of War taking up all the nominations too. That makes some sense, but picking the actor for The Stranger seems like an odd choice. Atreus should have won that one I think. And I'd rank Kratos above The Stranger too.
Ok, going to let you in on a little secret about the big awards like the BAFTAs and Oscars...
You have to put yourself forward for consideration for the long list (which is then reduced to the nominations later), and pay an entrance fee. And then if you’re shortlisted, you have to pay to provide copies of the game/film to the judges.
Each category is usually judged by a different group of people (cause who actually has the time to play every single nomination in every category?), usually people who have some connection to the discipline being judged. (So the music one is usually judged by academy members who are musicians or at least musically adjacent etc...)
The academy does not go out and look for cool games to nominate. If you don’t put yourself forward (and pay) you don’t get one.
So if ‘game that I like’ isn’t there, they probably didn’t bother with the process.
(For movies this isn’t a big deal, the studios will foot the bill to push the things they think can win, and the money involved isn’t much to them, but for an indie game dev... yeah, not worth it for the most part unless you have a publisher who wants to do it)
Other award ceremonies work differently of course. The game developers choice awards are entirely peer voted by IGDA members. There are very few that involve actual members of public voting, the main one there is the Golden Joysticks.
Yep, my wife used to work in PR and a big part of it was pushing (and creating) bullshit awards and inviting people who wanted to win awards. That's probably the thing that most struck me about God of War; it was a transparently desperate attempt to make an 'Oscar fodder' game. Focus grouped to fuck.