@sales
Someone from the Shane Satterfield school of thought, eh? I can't agree with that because it's not "Best effort of the year" which would probably go to some team that made a crappy game but worked day and night trying to get it ready for launch. Basing Game of the Year off development funding would be to me a disgusting move of commercialism over the actual quality of the product. You're right that it sucks for all those big teams that a smaller team made a more critically acclaimed game using a smaller budget, but in the end don't you think there are lots of teams that aren't on that goty list that feel slighted? Picking based off what will disappoint the least people is just ridiculous, and it completely undermines the effort of the people behind a game like Journey.
@Ghetto
What's your cut off out of curiosity? Games are much more variable than movies or songs so if you go down this road of picking something based on the hours of quality gameplay shouldn't an MMO be the winner every time? Isn't Dishonored with it's 6-8 hours of gameplay winning an insult to something like Xenoblade that was great for 40-50 hours? Why does the multiplayer for Halo 4 add value to it, but Journey's multiplayer doesn't for it? I know lots of people who have played through it again and again because of that multiplayer aspect. Basically, you can't arbitrarily decide on a number of hours a game has to be to be able to win GotY, if the reviewers came away loving that game more then anything else that released this year than it's what should win.
OT: Journey has a 94 on meta, one of the highest of the year, so I guess I'd say I'm shocked at the shock some people are showing at it's nomination for GotY. If GotY is supposed to mean anything it should not have arbitrary cutoff points for the length a game has to be to qualify, it shouldn't take things outside the game quality into account like developer effort, it should just look at what the judges loved playing the most this year. If that's Journey then it should win, if it's not something else should win, but I'm glad to see that downloadable games are finally in the running.
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