What are your picks for the 2023 Game Awards tonight?

Tonight is the 2023 Game Awards and this may be the fiercest Game of the Year competition I’ve ever seen, with Baldur’s Gate 3 going against Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for the top award. Sure, there’s other nominees for the award but it’d be one heck of an upset for neither of those two to win.

I haven’t played either yet — or any of the other games nominated — so I don’t have opinion as to which game deserves to win. That said, I feel pretty confident that Baldur’s Gate 3 will take GOTY. Not only does it seem to have a bigger fandom online, but I think Tears’ predecessor Breath of the Wild winning GOTY in 2017 will work against it. A Tears of the Kingdom win wouldn’t be completely surprising, though.

Blizzard has to be disappointed that Diablo 4 didn’t pick up a nomination for GOTY, although it did garner nominations for Innovation in Accessibility and Best Multiplayer. Still you have to think the development team had hoped for more recognition at the Game Awards. The rest of Blizzard’s franchises are sitting the awards out failing to get any nominations in the Best Ongoing or Best Mobile categories that they were most likely to show up in.

My biggest issue with the Game Awards are in the Indie categories, with the Best Debut Indie Game sharing many nominations with the Best Independent Game category, which has resulted in double winners since it was added. While I think Indie developers should get recognition for a strong debut, they should probably frame the award as Best Debut Indie Developer or Company — especially since it’s a feasible they could release more than one title in the year.

My favorite category at the 2023 Game Awards is Games for Impact. Once again I have not yet had a chance to play any of the nominations, but many of them are already on my gaming wish lists. The winner of the category likely gets moved up to the top of the list.

Finally, there’s Most Anticipated Game which tends to be debated as heatedly as GOTY does. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is the likely winner here, but I’ll be honest I’d love for Hades 2 to pull off the upset. It’s possible one of the other games will win — Star Wars Outlaws probably has a lot of franchise fan support — but it feels like FF7R2 will be the selection which should give Square Enix a nice consolation prize as Final Fantasy 16 didn’t earn a GOTY nomination as they likely hoped (although it has been nominated in several other major categories so they’re probably not as disappointed as Blizzard is).

So what do you think? Do you even care about the Game Awards? If not, what would make you care? Who do you think takes Game of the Year? What other categories are you interested in? Post your predictions in the comments below!