Geoff made sure to say he is not a part of the group that decide the nominees right before revealing the ones for the GOTY.
He knows there is backslash and tried to hide from it, lol.

Expansions won't make it. Eligibility doesn't matter, the reviewers/judges themselves heavily favor full games just like they favor certain genres over others, or new games over faithful remakes. Tekken 8 is eligible too and yet it probably won't even be nominated, because it's a traditional fighting game.

I'll make my prediction tomorrow after STALKER 2's reviews.

Nominations are already out

Played Final Fantasy, Astro and Metaphor

They are all really great, although I'd say they are all slightly inferior to most of GOTY winners they still deserve to win by their own merits. I think I'll be happy if any of them won

I think I cheer for Final Fantasy the most, it's one of my favorite franchises and I'm so fucking sick tired of the hate it keeps getting over and over, every time a new game comes out. It would be really sweet victory for Square after so many low quality clickbait articles saying the company is tanking

But right now my bet is still Astrobot. It's Sony best effort in a few years and it really did great, I think the industry understands Astrobot, a new 3D plataformer IP, needs more recognition than Final Fantasy

Looking at the game awards its interesting to see how Nintendo is not relevant at all for game of the year except the year Breath of the wild won, they don't make the kind of games that are relevant at such awards. Back in 2020 for example Animal Crossing got 10 % of the votes at the game awards compared to last of us part 2, since then Animal Crossing sold 50 million copies.

Basically the only Nintendo games that can get any votes at the game awards are Zelda games, and even they are far behind Sony games in popularity there. No wonder Nintendo never shows up or does anything at the game awards.

Wut? I was told the deadline was extended to include STALKER 2.

They actually nominated Erdtree!! No way it's winning the whole thing as that would piss off so many people including me! :(

Rebirth, AstroBot, and Metaphor made it as expected. The first two have the biggest shot, with AstroBot having the upper hand because Metaphor should steal more votes from Rebirth than from any other nominee. But I'm rooting for Rebirth.

Not surprised that Zelda couldn't make it. A little surprised (pleasantly) that Wukong made it and Helldivers 2 didn't.

My top 6 would have been something like:

1. AstroBot

2. Rebirth

3. Metaphor

4. Helldivers 2

5. Zelda

6. Balatro

The bottom 3 were hard to predict, coz the year ended up being quite stacked.

I doubt the DLC will win the GOTY.

To me FF7 Rebirth has it locked since the day it released.

I'm almost sure Odyssey would have won in 2017 if it hadn't been for Zelda. The Switch 2 3D Mario is a strong contender for 2025 GOTY.

I hope you're right.

This is the worst list of nominees I have ever seen. Was this year really that bad? Or did this show make itself into an even bigger joke than they already were?