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An “embarrassing indictment”: developers decry last nights The Game Awards ceremonyPlease wrap it up.
Please wrap it up.
Image credit:The Game Awards
Image credit:The Game Awards
Last night, Geoff Keighley revealed dozens of trailers for upcoming video games, and interviewed some of his favourite celebrites and best palss from the games industry on stage. He also happened to hand out some awards to game developers. At his awards show. TitledThe Game Awards.
Alice has thefull rundownon the needless farce of it all, but it isn’t just us cynical journalists who could smell something off. Several developers have recoiled at the show’s naked corporatism and disrespect for the craft. None more so than Josh Sawyer, director of the brilliant narrative mysteryPentiment.Airing his thoughts on X, Sawyer wrote. “This year’s The Game Awards is an embarrassing indictment of a segment of the industry desperate for validation via star power with little respect for the devs it’s supposedly honoring.”
Sawyer wasn’t the only developer who felt this year’s ceremony was dismissive of the developers it was allegedly created to celebrate. Replying to Sawyer’s tweet, Frontier’s senior tech writer Mags Donaldsonhighlighteda particularly grim example of what Sawyer was talking about. “Neil Newbon being told to wrap it up while talking about how his role has helped sexual assault survivors feel seen is…something.” Meanwhile, Former Vlambeer director Rami Ismailstatedhe had a “hard time reconciling playing Sam Lake off the stage after 30 seconds” with “having a many minutes-long Kojima bit that has literally nothing to show yet.”
When just 8% of your awards show is given over to the people who the show is notionally about, it does rather call into question the whole enterprise. Exciting as it is to see what developing are cooking up for the future, this industry is forward-looking enough. There should be space to stop and recognise the work of the individuals who make games not just possible, but brilliant, and the dismissive attitude of this year’s show is a rather stark demonstration of how disposable developers are seen to be in the moneymaking maw of the games industry.
