It might be a bit early for these questions, but I'm a bit bored so I thought "why not?"

Anyways, whether we like it or not, the Keighley's show has been embraced by the gaming media as the "official" GOTY Award, so I guess we have no more choice than to go with it, for now.

So, nowadays gamers and forum users like to use Metacritics as a metric to try to guess what games will be nominated for the "Game of the Year" category, but history has shown us that the TGA judges seem to have a different approach when it comes to their voting. For example, for the past 5 years, they have had a game with a score in the low 80s amongst their nominees, these are;

2018 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey (83)
2019 - Death Stranding (82)
2020 - Ghost of Tsushima (83)
2021 - Resident Evil Village (84)
2022 - Stray (83)

Now, it is worth remembering that, in most of these years, there were games with a score above 90 that were ignored by the judges (Like Half Life:Alyx (93) and Ori and the Will of the Wisps (90) both in 2020).

So my questions to you guys are;

a) do you think they will continue this trend and nominate a game with a score in the low 80s this year?
b) what game will that be?
c) what game with a score in the low 80s would YOU nominate?
d) what game with a score above 90 do you think will be snubbed this year?

a) If the games deserves it, sure. Score means nothing.

b) Who knows.

c) Cant tell. I dont know.

d) Tetris Effect

I mean, obviously the TGA judges agree with you there, but then we have to wonder, what exactly makes a game "deserving"?

A) It's possible, but a lot of strong candidates this year are 90+, Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate 3, Resident Evil 4, Street Fighter 6 to name a few...

B) I don't know. Star Wars Jedi Survivor?

C) Paranormasight (85). This game is a Visual Novel with some revolutionary gameplay elements for the genre.

D) The Case of the Golden Idol (93). I highly doubt this game will be nominated.

I've never watched it or kept track of the nominees, but looking at 2023 games in the mid-80s on OpenCritic with high profiles, I can definitely see Hogwarts Legacy getting a nomination.

As for 90s games that get overlooked (at least in the main category), I imagine any AA or indie game that doesn't get a huge word-of-mouth effect going will be ignored. Right now that'd be Jack Jeanne, although it has so few reviews that it'd only take one in the 80s to pull it below 90 anyway.

don't get me started...

I'll go (mostly) in reverse order:

d.)

Eh... I'd guess Street Fighter VI, since fighters not named Smash Bros. have trouble securing a spot. Unless it has a rough launch, Forza Motorsport could also be a snub - but it's more understandable with modern racers.

c.)

If we'd expand it to mid 80s then I'd go with Humanity.  Currently fighting as my overall GOTY too.

If sticking with low 80s I guess DREDGE would be a neat choice as well; then again, I'm looking at it more through the lens of a quaint indie game securing the spot instead of a pure quality assessment.

a.) & b.)

I think they will but it's tough to gauge which one it'll be atm. Hogwarts Legacy would be a safe bet were it not for the inevitability of Keighly's twitter feed and Game Awards' stream feed predictably filled with assholes called "MinecraftUrself" and "HangmansNoose93495" bleating about the pain he and his producers are causing by merely listing it. Hell, I don't blame him giving it the Voldemort Treatment across all categories. Save himself a few fucking headaches.

I'm just here to say that Bayonetta 2 was ROBBED of it's fully deserving GOTY award, to Dragon Age Inquisition of all games? Still grinds my gears all these years later.

a) Probably.

b) Hogwarts Legacy. To judge by its sales, more people will be upset if they snub it than if they don't, I mean. *sighs* Okay, I'm gonna weigh in to say that Hogwarts Legacy's average review score strikes me as inflated by brand familiarity. It's another generic open world adventure game about nothing that I bought just to spite so many rich and powerful people telling me I couldn't (which I suspect lots of other people did as well), and I regret it; the dullest, most deliberately inoffensive game ever to generate so much controversy. I wish it could be snubbed for that reason alone. It's not like it'll actually win though anyway, so whatever.

c) Nothing. All my favorite games this year so far have met with better scores.

d) My favorite game this year, Misericorde: Volume One. Based on 110 user reviews on Steam, it's currently sitting at 90% and enjoys a perfect score based on 35 user reviews on the smaller rival itch.io platform. I say it'll be snubbed because you've never heard of it before. In fact, to judge by the fact that Polygon is the only gaming site to professionally review it so far (and they don't score games)...here's their highly positive review if you're interested...it looks like even most professional critics haven't notice Misericorde's existence either, besides which I suspect it would prove an unpopular nominee even if by some miracle it were picked because it's a visual novel in the strictest sense of the term that's pretty much non-interactive (although it still definitely benefits from existing in a video game format; it wouldn't be quite as compelling in any other medium). This sort of thing happens fairly often to my favorite games. Narratively, it's a murder mystery revolving around medieval nuns and one of the best-written games ever made. Only the first chapter of the game is available so far, but it's still my favorite game of the year and will likely remain such. Anyway, yeah, it definitely won't make any Game of the Year listings that I can think of though IMO it deserves to.

Hmm, let's see. It seems the Game Awards most often have six nominees. Which would it be this year? Of the released games I see most likely Baldur's Gate III, Tears of the Kingdom and Hogwarts Legacy with a high possibility for Resident Evil 4 Remake. Of the coming games most likely Starfield and Spiderman 2 will enter the list. So the 80s game will most likely be Hogwarts. I see Street Fighter snubbed.