When it comes to The Game Awards, there is almost ALWAYS a controversy that fills up viewers’ minds by the time the show ends. Sometimes, it’s because of a certain game winning an award that it didn’t deserve to win. Other times, it’s because Geoff Keighley does things that clearly show bias and highlight his “connections” with certain people in the gaming community. But in the case of the upcoming 10th-anniversary show, things have gotten controversial just one day after the nominations were announced. Oh, and we’re not simply talking about “snubs,” as every award show deals with that. Instead, it’s about whether remakes should be nominated for the show’s top honor.
This was brought up because Resident Evil 4 Remake, which was released to great acclaim earlier in 2023, was nominated for Game of the Year alongside five other titles. Many consider it the “weakest” of the six due to its remake nature and think other titles got “snubbed” because of it. That raised lots of interesting questions about what should quality for GOTY and whether remakes of older games should get such nominations:
This is a many-layered issue, and so we’ll talk about this from multiple viewpoints. First off, we’ll give credit to The Game Awards by saying this ISN’T the first time they’ve done this. If you recall, Final Fantasy VII Remake was nominated for GOTY, and no one had any serious issues with that one being nominated.
Second, while it’s true that remakes aren’t “new games” in the overall sense, that doesn’t mean they aren’t “new content.” But Capcom’s remake and Square Enix’s remake didn’t just “visually update” the games so that they could have a new coat of paint. They instead added new content to them so that they could flesh out the world more.
For example, with the remade adventure of Leon S. Kennedy, they amped up certain sections action-wise, made it so you could break things like your knife, gave Ashley more character development, and so on. For Cloud’s remake, they “sealed gamers” within Midgar and gave them a whole new way to explore the city and take part in its events. While many were curious how that would play out, the awards it got and sales it had proved that people loved the remake.
So, did The Game Awards make a flub by having a remake in its “Game of the Year” category? That’s up for you to judge, but this might just be a battle of perspective versus intent.
