Geoff Keighley redeemed himself with his performance on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of The Game Awards. It was an evening full of unforgettable moments, latest game trailers and well-deserved awards.
I used to be at the Peacock Theater for over three hours to witness all of it on Thursday night. On the same day, we hosted our own GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games event, but on the day of the biggest gaming celebration, I managed to create 17 stories.
Keighley has made amends for last yr’s criticism when he was faced with allegations of failing to acknowledge layoffs in the games industry after a short period of time banishing award winners from the stage and failing to properly protect the stage.
There was plenty of security on stage this yr to maintain the rushers at bay, in addition to enough time for speakers like Swen Vincke, who handed out the Game of the Year award last yr after winning the title (and shortening his speech) last yr for Baldur’s Gate III. Vincke predicted that the best game of 2025 will likely be created by leaders who “don’t treat developers like numbers on a spreadsheet.”
This time, Keighley boasted of 34,000 industry layoffs in the last 2.5 years and presented the first-ever Game Changer award to Amir Satvat, the lone one that has done so much to make work possible for so many programmers.
Satvat helped over 3,000 people find work by creating an easily accessible job resource that collected all available positions in the gaming industry. An emotional Satvat stated that you would be able to’t make great games without great people and that his parents taught him that his price lies in how he treats other people. He took these ideas to heart, creating spreadsheets and more to serve the work of developers.
Another good thing about Keighley’s performance was that he brought games. There were definitely no rumors about Half-Life 3, and Rockstar Games didn’t appear in Grand Theft Auto VI. Nintendo didn’t boast about its Switch 2.
However, the Keighley stage was where solo creator Balatro won three awards, and Black Myth: Wukong won quite a few awards that showcased China’s development capabilities and gave Chinese culture a place on the world stage. And where Team Asobi showed everyone that a easy 3D platformer, Astro Bot, could win game of the yr. As a huge Senua fan, I used to be joyful that Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II won for Best Audio Design and Melina Juergens won for Best Performance (for an unprecedented second time).
Naughty Dog has debuted a latest mental property, the first latest game series since The Last of Us launched 11 years ago in 2013. The title, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, was a sci-fi game that featured a bald woman who, to some weak minds, will exclaim “I woke up.”
The graphics were astonishingly realistic, but there have been some strange product placements, comparable to the word “Porsche” on the back of a spaceship. With titles like Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter, Uncharted, and The Last of Us, Naughty Dog has a triple-A popularity price maintaining.
But Intergalactic wasn’t the best latest game trailer on display, perhaps because it spent a little too much time showing a woman shaving her head.
The Witcher 4 trailer showed the best way to do this. It told a moving, graphic and cinematic story in such a short time, highlighting the female Witcher Ciri of Cintra as an alternative of the fundamental character Geralt of Rivia. Reminding me that movies are an art form in themselves, the trailer depicted a scene where the townspeople sacrificed a young girl to a “god” who was actually just a monster. Ciri tried to save lots of the woman and had an epic fight with a spider-like monster with a human head, which was truly terrifying. It didn’t work out well. The final comment was incredibly accurate: “There are no gods here, only monsters.”
Elden Ring developers From Software are back with Elden Ring: Nightreign, a latest cooperative game in the dark world of Elden Ring for people like me who cannot complete such games on our own.
I used to be also joyful to see the appearance of stars like Harrison Ford, who joked alongside voice actor Troy Baker, who starred in the great film “Indiana Jones and the Big Circle” (which got here out too late in the yr to get any prizes).
In light of our Hollywood and Olympic event, it was nice to see so much cross-industry collaboration. AGBO, founded by the Russo brothers who made the Avengers movies, collaborated with Neople to create the upcoming Nexon film The First Berserker: Khazan, which was brutal enough for gamers.
There was also Snoop Dogg, who sang a song from his latest album, which was released that very same evening. This is once again an example of how presenting players with entertainment, whether from the Fallout TV show or Snoop Dogg’s latest work, is a great approach to promote your product. Unfortunately, Snoop didn’t showcase the latest game.
But there have been also gaming superstars there. Josef Fares, founder of Hazelight and creator of 2021 Game of the Year, It Takes Two, is back with one other split-screen co-op game called Split Fiction. He said the team would “screw everything up without screwing anything up,” and this development philosophy led to the creation of a game in which players jump in and out of science fiction and fantasy worlds to unravel puzzles. The part about farting pigs made me laugh.
Fares famously said, “Fuck the Oscars” at The Game Awards in 2017. But the interesting thing now, when the wonderful marriages of industries are evident in shows like Fallout (winner of best game adaptation), is that we’re in a golden era Hollywood and cooperation in games.
Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software, gave a first look at Borderlands 4, hopefully redeeming the franchise after this summer’s disastrous Borderlands movie. It looked great, though the familiar art style was like a comic book come to life.
Mafia: The Old Country developer Hangar 13 has released a trailer showcasing the origins of the “made” man and the rise of the mafia in Sicily in the early twentieth century. It was a fascinating scene with interesting characters and brutally choreographed violence. I enjoyed Mafia III’s mix of narrative and action-adventure, and I expect this game to proceed that tradition.
I also liked that veteran game developer Warren Spector and his studio OtherSide Entertainment released a trailer for Thick As Thieves, which brings the progressive gameplay of Thief (which Spector and his team pioneered in the late Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s) to the next level with Thief. emerging gameplay of 4 people fighting each other in competitive multiplayer.
Finally, it was nice to see Wargaming, a company that thrived on live services like World of Tanks and World of Warships, emerge with an original mental property, Steel Hunters, a sci-fi mech game. It shows that the industry can still pursue latest game designs without being held back by the innovator’s dilemma.
It was also great to see Netflix show the mobile game (December 17) Squid Game Unleashed, tied in with the December 26 premiere of the second season of Squid Game, the hottest Netflix series ever.
Game of Thrones is getting a similar treatment with Game of Thrones: Kingsroad from Netmarble and Warner Bros. Pocket Pair’s Palworld, which has sold 25 million copies a month, will receive an expansion on December 23.
We may also get Okami 2 from the latest Capcom studio. Original director Hideki Kamiya returns to helm the sequel as head of the Clovers studio. Other studios helping with the game include M-Two and Machine Head Works.
It was a great day for the gaming industry, which is still having to catch its breath after so many studio closures and layoffs over the past 2.5 years. Let’s hope that one good day will lead to a different, and one good The Game Awards show will result in many others.