Cyberpunk 2077 Should Not Have Won Best Ongoing Game At The Game Awards

Cyberpunk 2077 is decent now, maybe even good. The base ga൲me and Phantom Liberty expansion are in good enough standing that I’ve resolved to ♍finally play it next year, especially now that CD Projekt Red won’t be releasing any more major updates.

It’s not all it ༺was promised to be, but stꦆill pretty good! Phantom Liberty has even made at least one member of TheGamer’s GOTY list. The developers have been working for years on redeeming the game’s botched launch and the many grievances players had with it. However, that doesn’t make it an ongoing game, and I’m not sure why it was classified as such at The Game Awards this year.

The five games nominated for Best Ongoing Game were Cyberpunk 2077, Apex Legends, Final Fantasy 14, Fortnite, and Genshin Impact. All of these games, bar Cyberpunk, are live-service games. That means they’re getting prolonged profits by continuously creating value and monetising after their initial download. These games usually have seasons. Apex Legends is ongoing. Fortnite is ongoing. Cyberpunk 2077, a single-player finite campaign that has been consistently patched up and iterated on over the last three years because of a bad launch, is not an ongoing game.

Look, there were a lot of things wrong with TGA. I wrote about my favourite moment꧟s at the show, and how each was immediately overshadowed by poor decision-making and blatant clout-chasing. Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley wrote about 168澳洲幸ꦡ运5开奖网:how tired she was of celebrity speakers overshadowing actual developers who deserved their time in the sun. My colleague Eric Switzer 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:denounced the show as a glorified☂ marketing event, and we even saw developers and actors protesting outside the event over th💜eir lack of protections and poor workiꦿng conditions. The Game Awards are flawed in many, many ways.

Cyberpunk 2077 Will Never🌳 Erase Its Own Troubled History

⭕The ultimate edition is coꦆming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in a new, heavily patched form.

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But what really confuses me is that Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t even the only game that’s been misclassified at this year’s awards. A whole lot of fuss was kicked up when the nominations were announced, because Dave the Diver was, controversially, nominated for best indie despit𒅌e being published by a multi-billion dollar company and described by its own developer as “not indie”. Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3, on the other hand, could technically be called an independent studio (though Tencent has a minority stake in it), depending on whether you define indie as being budget-based, tied to a studio’s independence, or being entirely about vib༒es.

This raises the question: who decides what games are nominated for each category? From Geoff Keighley’s answer to the question of why Dave the Diver was nominated for best indie at all, we can gather that it’s down to the jury. When it comes to Dave the Diver’s indie-ness, I get it – an undiscerning jury member could have looked at the game and thought, well, it sure seems like an indie.

But how on earth that could extend to Cyberpunk 2077 being considered an ongoing game is completely beyond me. Since the category’s introduction in 2017, the only other game that has ever been nominated for the category and is arguably not a live-service game is No Man’s Sky, and there’s still a pretty strong argument for it counting as ongoing because of the multiple major updates it has seen every year since its release. No Man’s Sky’s 27 pieces of DLC have all been free, making its update schedule more closely resemble live-service seasons. In contrast, Cyberpunk’s updates haven’t been so much to content as they have been to fix the experience. One paid expansion does not an ongoing gam✃e make.

Nominees are chosen by the awards’ jury, which means that sending out a set of guidelines for each category defining what counts would make it harder for outliers like Dave the Diver and Cyberpunk 2077 to slip through the cracks, though it does seem that at some 🦄point the TGA organisers should have stepped in to say something. How are we supposed to take the one of the only gaming awards show we have seriously if we don’t even have the vaguest of rules when it comes to what gets nominated? Maybe Keighley really will take all the criticism of the show into account for next year’s run, but who knows? Maybe he’ll get Taylor Swift to announce the GOTY in 2024 and hope that makes up for it.