Whaaat, they went to all that effort creating a new site to replace the blog site that had stopped being updated... only to stop updating their own site within a matter of weeks? Man, what a waste.

Looks like I was on point with RE4 (it's currently 4th in the tally) and about BG3 winning, but it definitely wasn't as close as I expected. I hadn't exactly expected BG3 to dominate Reader's Choice awards like it has since it seemed like a game less people had played but in the end it ended up being one of the best sellers of the year so that was definitely a miscalculation.

Well, looking at the past years, it seems like this is kinda a usual distribution. In most years the winner is around 50% of the GOTYs and other titles fall far behind. Closest to what you suggest is 2013 with 47% of GOTYs for The Last of Us and 30% for GTA V. So even in a year like this one, with many good games usually a clear candidate evolves.

And yeah, I fully expected games like Spiderman and Hogwarts Legacy to be ahead of Resident Evil. I didn't put it in the nine choices, because I actually had more than 10 candidates considered, Resident Evil one of them, but thought others might be more likely. A total dark horse for me was Alan Wake though, I didn't consider it at all. I am very surprised by this.

And about BG3 - I hoped it would win, but as you say it is kinda a niche genre and if you ask people last year if a turn-based party-focused CRPG can win, most would have said no. I fully expected for instance the Geoff Keileygh show to give it to either Zelda or Spiderman, as this usually is very tilted towards action adventures.

CRPGs were always, and still are, a niche genre - and from my POV, BG3 was not made for CRPG (and BG) fans first, but was more targeting the mass market that is after systemic gameplay mechanics, AAA production values and "romancing the companions" silliness, so I'd say most sales come from that direction. Being D&D, with Hasbro behind it, helped quite a bit. Larian being 30% owned by Tencent helped with production values. BG3 actually being quite good megadungeon-crawler (but not so good of an CRPG) helped as well. The media hype storm probably helped the most.

I'd say by the way mainstream gaming "journalist" were gobbling up all of that made it more than obvious that it will be the clear winner.

bg3's overwhelming victory is also explained by the fact that the breath of wild formula caused burnout in many people, especially those who played the 2 games in a short space of time, I see in the zelda communities many fans begging for the return of the classic formula