Just replayed Metroid Dread again and it's so good. Raven Beak is the perfect villain for the game and the final fight is simply fantastic.
I have changed my pfp to my third favorite video game villain.

Not a big shocker, but damn that lead.
I guess the rest of the votes were kind of all over the place if 4.5 % was enough to make the shortlist.

I am actually happy, that an indie game and a racing game were able to compete in the overall game of the year category. That is unusual and we hopefully should see more of it.

We're here at the big award already! Well this being an award ceremony and all, I better get dressed up for the occasion!

I picked It Takes Two for the ultimate award 'cause, well, the co-op was so refreshingly creative and polished that playing through the game brought me and my then-girlfriend closer together and also changed my opinion of co-op gaming as a thing, and I don't feel like you can ask for more than that. And yeah, I was also charmed by its sweet and earnest story. Coming together does seem like something the world (especially my country) needs more of right now.

My preference aligned with that of the critics for the third year in a row (what's up with that?). To judge by the volume of reader's choice awards it also won (see the aforementioned link), it was also the second choice of gamers themselves, perhaps reflecting the impact that critical opinion can have on what games people opt to try!

Anyway, congratulations to Metroid Dread for being this year's winner on VGC! While that might seem like a conventional choice on the surface level, it's actually really not that conventional. Check out the aforementioned link and you'll see that, in fact, the game has won just two other reader's choice awards so far, making it part of a three-way tie for sixth place, and ranks only in fifth among media outlets as well so far. (Fun aside: Returnal got just as many reader's choice awards despite selling fewer copies, perhaps implying a higher customer satisfaction rate. Just had to point that out!) You know what the reader's choice winner for the year was? Resident Evil Village, which didn't even make the GOTY shortlist here despite there being a rather low vote threshold for doing so. These facts establish the VGC community's preferences as quite distinct from those of most hardcore video gamers.

A couple other fun facts about Metroid Dread's victory here:

-VGC is among the only gaming sites to choose a female-centered title for a second consecutive year. This despite its almost exclusively male membership. That's kinda cool!

-This is only the second time that a 2D platforming game has won GOTY on this site.

-This is the first Switch exclusive to win GOTY on VGC despite many other such titles selling much better over the years, indicating that VGC almost uniquely considers Metroid Dread to be among the very best games ever released for the Switch.

I'd also like to take just a moment to highlight some of the outlets that made extremely unorthodox choices with their GOTY awards this year, and namely to highlight their reasoning behind those unusual choices.

The two sites that chose Chicory: A Colorful Tale as their Game of the Year: the Destructoid write-up and the MinnMax commentary.

Here are the overviews from the two sites that gave Kena: Bridge of Spirits their ultimate awards: DualShockers' opinion and the Houston Press write-up.

The one site that gave their ultimate award to Life is Strange: True Colors: KeenGamer's overview.

And here's the one site that chose The Arful Escape: the L.A. Times' opinion.

The L.A. Times' top 10 list was favorite one to read so far. They chose:

1) The Artful Escape
2) Psychonauts 2
3) Sable
4) Chicory: A Colorful Tale
5) Unpacking
6) Last Call
7) Overboard
8) Genesis Noir
9) Halo Infinite
10) Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery

That's the most refreshingly original list I've read to date! Not sure I agree with just all the logic there myself, but it was fun just to see some less conventional, really creative choices. Unpacking, Last Call, and Overboard are now my next must-buys as a result! My own top ten for 2021 (so far) are...

1) It Takes Two
2) Returnal
3) Chicory: A Colorful Tale
4) Solar Ash
5) The Artful Escape
6) Psychonauts 2
7) Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
8) Deathloop
9) Metroid Dread
10) The Medium

They probably are not even able to get a PS5. Also the Sony premium made sure that even if they got a PS5 this wouldn't be a game they pick up quickly. But yes from a shooting standpoint it deserves one.

LittleBigPlanet is a 2D game and won GOTY on this site in 2008. Also Smash Bros is a 2D fighter.

Metroid Dread is so far the first and only Switch exclusive to win GOTY. Zelda Breath of the Wild is also a Wii U game.

I didn't know LittleBigPlanet was a 2D game!

And I totally forgot that Breath of the Wild also came out for the Wii U. In fact, I'd almost forgotten about the Wii U entirely. Oh yeah, that happened.

Well I have now edited my earlier post to account for these corrections.

I have to admit that I'd find it extremely cool intrinsically if there were to be a third consecutive case of this happening, and yes, Horizon Zero Dawn is like either the first or second best-selling video game with a female lead character to date (we need a new sales update to confirm if it's passed the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot's sales yet, but it was close as of the last update we got)...but I would point out that, frankly, that particular game likely benefited from the social context surrounding its release window in early 2017. That was the year when "feminism" was the most-searched term on Webster's Online Dictionary, the year when the original Women's March wound up being the most-attended single-day protest event in American history, and the year the Me Too movement was named Time magazine's Person of the Year. It was, in other words, the peak of the fourth and most recent feminist wave here in the United States, and women-centric media benefited from it across the board. For example, in film, not only did The Shape of Water win Best Picture at the Oscars for the year, but what's more 2017 also emerged as the first year since 1958 that all of the top three highest-grossing box office blockbusters were titles with female lead characters (those being The Last Jedi, the live-action Beauty and the Beast remake, and the Wonder Woman movie). In terms of TV series, similarly, The Handmaid's Tale became both a mass and award-winning phenomenon. Horizon Zero Dawn became one of the two all-time best-selling video games with a female lead character, and also the most award-winning female-led video game in history up to that point in that same cultural-historical context. Probably not a coincidence, especially given the gaming media's contemporaneous framing of it as comparable to the well-known Legend of Zelda games. It just seems to me like that moment has now passed and that, accordingly, the same phenomenon is unlikely to be repeated this year, and what's more even the original wasn't actually 2017's overall GOTY winner either here or in general for that matter.

Also, considering that the Breath of the Wild sequel is (so far) due out this year, somehow I kind of doubt that anything else will be winning the ultimate award on this site for 2022. The next GOTY award is pretty much already in the bag, I think.

Fewer people own Xbox Series systems than PlayStation 5s, and yet Halo Infinite is VGC's runner-up choice for Game of the Year while Returnal fails to make the shortlist. I don't think system sales have that much to do with it, in other words. Enough people had access to the platform, they just didn't buy the game and that's mostly just Returnal being a new IP from a smaller, less familiar developer as opposed to a familiar, established franchise, and a fully-priced one, moreover, that belongs to a rather challenging (i.e. not entry-level-gamer accessible) genre not commonplace and well-established in the mainstream gaming landscape. All of those factors likely reduced sales.

Aaah, that's true! I almost forget about the last-gen versions of games these days.