The MMO, social, mobile and free-to-play genres were up to bat at the Game Developers Online Choice Awards. The awards took place in Austin, Texas on Wednesday night and the winners for each category weren't surprising.
The wildly popular League of Legends took home awards for Best Community Relations, the Audience Award (basically, the game that won the audience's votes) and Best Live Game.
There were lots of thanks and appreciation going around, but one of Riot's most memorable thank yous was to the actual guys who keep the network up and running.
"I wanted to thank a group of teams at Riot who often gets overlooked in this industry…the guys who keep their eyes on our network operations 24/7… those are the guys who let us basically while the plane is mid-air allow the developers to upgrade the engines. We've literally built the whole company around the idea that players would enjoy a game that's always fresh and evolving and updating, and this award is an amazing recognition of that."
Riot also thanked their fans and their team for always keeping an eye on what the players wanted.
As Star Wars: The Old Republic recently went free-to-play following a steady decline in subscribers, they were entered into the competition as well. BioWare Austin won the most awards with ones in Best Online Game Design, Best Online Visual Arts, Best Online Technology, and Best New Online Game.
"It was a long journey to get there, and a lot of people. It's a huge game, the biggest thing I can imagine to do, this project. A lot of effort went into it." said former executive producer Richard Vogel, who was brought on stage by the current team members in attendance to accept the award with them.
Other notable wins were from Blizzard Entertainment with Best Audio for an Online Game with Diablo III and even more prestigiously World of Warcraft was inducted into their Hall of Fame. Blizzard co-founder Frank Pierce wanted to acknowledge those who created the foundation of the game.
"Thanks to all the developers who have worked on World of Warcraft throughout the years. In particular I want to thank the team that created vanilla WoW about 8 years ago. These are the people who laid the foundation for the subsequent success of WoW… We've learned a lot over the last eight years, and we've learned that the World of Warcraft community is the glue that holds it all together."
Congratulations to all of the developers who won or were nominated for producing truly high quality products for the gaming industry. You're the companies that set the bar for all of us.
Source: Gamasutra
