How can Geoff Keighley fix The Game Awards?

The Game Awards were last week and while they were their standard celebration of the year’s best video games and creators (congratulations again to Baldur’s Gate 3 on winning Game of the Year), there was a lot of criticism afterwards. Whether it was winners being encouraged to leave the stage after just 30 seconds, or the fact that most awards were given out rapid fire, or how much time was wasted by celebrities being brought on stage for reasons that frankly felt unnecessary there was a lot of reasons not to enjoy the three-plus hour broadcast. I’m not sure the problems are solvable, though.

Part of the issue is the lack of competition: there are no other gaming awards that currently matter in the industry, so The Game Awards are free to do whatever they want knowing all eyes will be on them.  And what they apparently want to do is take money from publishers to showcase upcoming games, not “waste time” talking about games that have already been released. Why let the Baldur’s Gate 3 team give proper tribute to deceased lead cinematic artist Jim Southworth when there isn’t money to be made by letting them do so? Why should the creators of the Indie Game of the Year Sea of Stars get a chance to thank all those who supported the game via Kickstarter and in their development? It’s frustrating.

Making it even worse, though, is that you then get Hideo Kojima and celebrity director Jordan Peele spending over five minutes on stage barely telling us anything about Kojima’s next title. I can only speak for myself, but I’d rather have the winner of Best Score & Music (Final Fantasy 16, for the record) come on stage to talk for that time instead.

Look, I get it, Geoff Keighley has a lucrative thing going on now between TGA and the Summer Game Fest. But if the goal is to actually reward gaming excellence then the focus should be on the awards, not two dozen titles that are years away. The easy solution is to split the awards into their own show and have a separate showcase event for all the announcements and trailers and uncomfortable celebrities (call it Winter Game Fest). If they’re not going to do that, though, they should just cut the awards out entirely because they certainly don’t seem interested in giving them out anymore.

But what do you think? Do you feel the award winners got short shrift at The Game Awards this year? Or were you even watching for the awards to begin with?