No surprise Dark Souls wasnt on it, its a RPG. Skyrims clearly a better and vastly more popular RPG. So it never had a chance.

All 5 games that were nominated were completely different from one another.

Skyrim more popular then Dark Souls sure. Clearly better? Personal Taste. I'm still excited a rpg won game of the year tho.

Their is a reason why we hardly see any other developper making a game so huge like elder Scrolls and that is because those developpers just can't..but yeah giving an award to game that are already finished in less than ten hours or just want you to do a lot of backtracking to enlarge the game experience deserve the GOTY award =p...

What?  Have you looked into how a game like Skyrim works?  It's not that difficult technically.  There is no reason for the quality of the game to be poor technically.  Once the engine is developed you use the tools to produce quests.  Depending on man hours you can produce more and more quests.  I've built quests for Oblivion, many have.  The content is based on re-using pre-fabricated objects - so you see the same cave corner, corridor, etc. repeating and repeating.

Now the skill the Bethesda guys do have is producing a lot of fun quests and taking the time to develop the many routines for the NPCs.  But all that runs on a a core set of tools.  Those tools are no more complex than any other large, complex game - TBH the complex physics in Unchared 3 are probably more demanding from a coding point of view than anything in Skyrim.  Heck, the swimming pool of water in Uncharted 3 on the boat is technically more difficult than anything I've yet encountered in Skyrim.

So... there is no excuse for the core code being so buggy.  The bottom line is Bethesda appear to be code at designing a game but average at coding a game - heck their engine is still DirectX 9 based when the latest version is DirextX11 - and given the success of their games and the time they have to develop there is no excuse for this.  They simply don't seem to employ good enough code development procedures - and that shouldn't be rewarded.

even with so many bugs... =_=

No other developer as attempted a game like Elder Scrolls. Even GTA isnt close as a sandbox title. 

Skyrims engine is doing SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much more than other gams. I'm not surprised it has glitches. It would take years to iron thm all out. The game even tracks if you take an aple from Solitude and drop it in Dawnstar. And it does this for every single item in the game. which is hundereds of thousands.

Thats why I am far more ipressed with Skyrims engine and Visuals over something easy to do like Gears 3 or Uncharted 3. Even tough Ilike those games to.

Well one has a metacritic of 96 and the other a 89. Id say it appears clearly better to me.

There i added a poll, now people can choose what they really thought should have won the award.

For all the fun I've been having with Skyrim (200+ hours now), I wouldn't consider it for my GOTY (that honour goes to Dark Souls without any doubt), but I can clearly see why it would populary gain the vote of the majority.

Skyrim is a fun, vast, expansive and encompassing game, with a myriad of possibilities. Does it have some problems? Yes it does, even for the PC version (which is the one I have). Do those problems detract from the experience? Other from the Lag glitch on the PS3 there's no reason for that.

To be honest this whole deal is blown out of proportion, but mostly by newcomers to Bethesda games (that started gaming on them in this generation).
I had quite a few laughs when I read in one of the comments that Bethesda always gets free passes from the Media, which when put into perspective on how much they were bashed, bullied and destroyed critically in the 90s (and with reason, because if you people think Skyrim is buggy, never, ever, touch Arena or Daggerfall).

Plus, like another user has said, there's not a lot of developers that take the gamble to develop games as expansive and open as Bethesda games are. Sure, they do have some basic programming errors that account for a lot of their bugs and poorly implemented routines, but when you've got a game with thousands of minuscule variables that constantly add up from the start of the game and dynamically affect one another, there's bound to be some fuck-ups here and there.

Also, it's not like smaller games come out glitch or bug free? Bugs and Glitches, even game-breaking ones are present since the early generations, be it or consoles or PC games. Heck, even modern console releases are full of glitches, for example the game-breaking glitch on Skyward Sword.

Anyway, we had a thread for the bitching of Skyrim's bugs, I propose that people continue to use it to allow a cleaner atmosphere whenever Skyrim is talked about in other threads.

Imo Dark Souls was a great little game, although I am kinda biased against Skyrim, since I couldn't play Oblivion without punching myself in the face for purchasing it. - I really don't know why I couldn't play that game, nor F3. They didn't age very well on consoles.