Developers blast the celeb-laden Game Awards as 'an embarrassing indictment of a segment of the industry desperate for validation… with little respect for the devs'

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - DECEMBER 07: Actors Aaron Moten, Ella Purnell, and Walton Goggins speak onstage during "Fallout" Cast and Creator at The Game Awards at Peacock Theater on December 07, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.
(Image credit: Anna Webber/Getty Images for Prime Video)
Recent updates

10:40 am PT: After this article was published, Game Awards producer and host Geoff Keighley responded to criticism of the acceptance speech time limit on X. "By the way - I do agree that the music was played too fast for award winners this year, and I asked our team to relax that rule as the show went on," said Keighley. "While no one was actually cut off, it's something to address going forward."

The Game Awards have been and gone, turning the PC Gamer homepage into something like the deranged Instagram feed of someone obsessed with Sam Lake and Swen Vincke, but it's left plenty to discuss—and criticise—in its wake. 

In particular, the show has come under fire for the short time allotted to acceptance speeches and celebrations of nominated games, with some devs rankling at celebrities getting seemingly limitless time to ramble while game makers were told to "Please wrap it up" after barely half a minute.

Plenty of devs have taken to Twitter to voice their criticisms of the show, perhaps none more pointedly than Obsidian's studio design director Josh Sawyer (who you know from Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and Pentiment), who wrote "This year’s The Game Awards is an embarrassing indictment of a segment of the industry desperate for validation via star power with little respect for the devs it’s supposedly honoring."

Blistering stuff, but Sawyer was far from the only dev to take issue. Rami Ismail—of Luftrausers and Nuclear Throne fame—wrote that he had "a hard time reconciling playing Sam Lake off the stage after 30 seconds, or the publisher representing COCOON's devs after the same, but having a many minutes-long Kojima bit for a game that has literally nothing to show yet," adding "That felt wrong, genuinely." 

The show began playing Lake off during his acceptance of the Best Narrative award for Alan Wake 2 after about a minute (although Axios reporter Stephen Totilo reports that award recipients got the now-notorious "Please wrap it up" sign after 30 seconds), while Kojima and collaborator Jordan Peele got about six and a half minutes to chat OD on stage with Keighley.

There were plenty of other dev comments along the same lines. Firaxis narrative director Cat Manning sarcastically remarked that they "love doing prolonged unfunny bits rather than listening to game devs talk about their work." Another, Arbitrary Metric's Jessica Harvey, tweeted that it's "great how the game awards are treating the award winners like they're an inconvenience getting in the way of all the paid ads." 

Some drew attention to the tastelessness of throwing up the "Please wrap it up" autocue while Larian's Swen Vincke was talking about team members who had died over the course of Baldur's Gate 3's development. Though, to be fair, that's more a case of the automatic timer hitting 0 at a distinctly unfortunate time. Still, the timer could presumably have been delayed by production.

Others just got existential: indie dev Antonio Freyre was prompted to ask themself "What am I doing with my time here on Earth" as they found themself "clapping at a bunch of ads, watching a bunch of executives gloat while Hollywood celebs read from a script like robots."

Frankly? I think they have a point. To me, The Game Awards has always felt like an event torn between two poles: On the one hand, it's a glitzy, E3-style marketing blitz where people with long titles at big corporations get on-stage and implore you to please get excited for their next thing. 

On the other, it's meant to be a prestigious, Oscars-style event about celebrating the craft and art of videogames. It strikes me that those two aspects of the show will never exist harmoniously and, as VGU.TV's Emmett Watkins Jr. noted, the more the former dominates the latter, the less likely moments like the acceptance speech for That Dragon, Cancer become. Perhaps it's better to separate out our awards shows from our trailer reels: or maybe, if the industry at large doesn't like what Keighley's doing, it needs to think about what it can offer as an alternative.

Joshua Wolens
News Writer

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

Read more
Swen Vincke presenting Game of the Year at the 2024 Game Awards
Larian boss Swen Vincke calls out pretty much the entire videogame industry at The Game Awards
Amir Satvat
This year The Game Awards finally tackled the plague of game industry layoffs
sniper elite 5 cover
Sniper Elite CEO reckons Swen Vincke is right to snarl at short-sighted publishers: 'You could argue that their business at senior level isn't making games… their business is managing their shareholders' perceptions'
Amir Satvat accepting his award at the 2024 Game Awards.
Amir Satvat says he's received 'countless' hateful messages after being honored at The Game Awards for helping laid-off devs: 'This can happen to you too when you sacrifice over 2,000 hours of your time to help the industry'
Mark Darrah
BioWare veteran calls out the 'cruelty' of fans celebrating layoffs: 'You are crossing a line, and you're probably attacking the wrong person anyway'
black myth: wukong
Black Myth: Wukong boss is bummed out about not winning Game of the Year at The Game Awards, but has high hopes for the future of the Chinese game industry
Latest in Gaming Industry
Yoda Luke and R2 in Lego form.
Lego is going to make its videogames in-house from now on, says it would 'almost rather overinvest'
A masked man with an axe in the woods
Rebellion CEO seems kind of awed by major studios making massive videogames: 'How do you organize a game that has 2,000 people working on it?'
A computer screen with program code warning of a detected malware script program. 3d illustration
Coder faces 10 years' jailtime for creating a 'kill switch' that screwed-up his employers' systems when he was laid off
Atomfall screenshot
Rebellion CEO puts the studio's recent avoidance of layoffs down to control of scope and cost: 'Sometimes we say, guys, this game's too big'
Judge Dredd promotional image in Warzone
Half-a-dozen 2000AD games were in the works before fizzling out: 'The games you get to see are a tiny representative of the number that get started—sadly'
sniper elite 5 cover
Sniper Elite CEO reckons Swen Vincke is right to snarl at short-sighted publishers: 'You could argue that their business at senior level isn't making games… their business is managing their shareholders' perceptions'
Latest in News
Mark Darrah
BioWare veteran says a big delay is better than lots of little ones, because sometimes you just gotta 'burn it down and take the other fork in the road'
Two rising ronin facing each other
Rise of the Ronin is another crappy PC port, performance patch coming 'soon'
Defiance players
A dead MMO that launched with a now-cancelled TV show in 2013 is coming back 4 years after servers were shut down
The OpenAI logo is being displayed on a smartphone with an AI brain visible in the background, in this photo illustration taken in Brussels, Belgium, on January 2, 2024. (Photo illustration by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
OpenAI is working on a new AI model Sam Altman says is ‘good at creative writing’ but to me it reads like a 15-year-old's journal
Alma, the handler from Monster Hunter Wilds, closes her eyes and looks a little disappointed.
This impractical method of getting a 1-second capture time in Monster Hunter Wilds can make you the fastest hunter alive—on paper
Yoda Luke and R2 in Lego form.
Lego is going to make its videogames in-house from now on, says it would 'almost rather overinvest'