In 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it would expand the Oscar category for Best Picture from five to 10 nominees. Most observers interpreted the move as an attempt to broaden the types of films nominated, and thus the appeal of the Oscars themselves. There had been much discussion of the failure to nominate Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Batman blockbuster The Dark Knight from the previous year, and whether the Oscars was risking cultural irrelevance by appearing to favor arthouse fare over popular cinema. Expanding the field to 10 films might save some embarrassment without requiring the Academy’s voting body to change its taste wholesale.
It worked, up to a point. In the years since, we’ve seen Best Picture nominations for the likes of Avatar, Black Panther, Top Gun: Maverick, Barbie, and Wicked, all box-office champions and huge popular favorites. And that’s happened despite an increasingly large and diverse Academy voting body leaning even harder away from the Hollywood mainstream and toward arthouse and international titles like Parasite and Anora. The thinking goes that more films nominated means a higher chance people will feel their tastes reflected, and will make the awards seem more relevant and inclusive.
This raises a simple question for video gaming: Should The Game Awards do the same for Game of the Year?
Currently, six games are nominated for GOTY; it used to be five, in common with most other categories, but an additional nominee was added in 2018. The simplest version of the argument for increasing this to 10 is that a lot of games come out every year, and limiting the award to six titles doesn’t allow for a lot of representation. In a good year, there’s a chance that a game that’s widely perceived as worthy of a nomination won’t get through.
This happened in 2023, when Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield was edged out of an exceptionally strong GOTY field which included Baldur’s Gate 3, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Alan Wake 2. Bethesda fans were quick to call for a 10-game limit then. You could make this case in any given year; this year, for example, there’s every chance that Ghost of Yōtei and Hades 2 might push, say, Death Stranding 2 out of the running — an unthinkable outcome for an acclaimed game by the most famous working game designer (and notable supporter of The Game Awards), Hideo Kojima.
The major difference between The Game Awards and the Oscars, however, is that the argument about how it reflects popular taste is inverted. The Game Awards jury tends to favor big productions with huge fan audiences like previous winners The Witcher 3, God of War, and Elden Ring. Last year’s Astro Bot is the only GOTY winner to sell less than 10 million copies in the award’s history.
Smaller, artier games from indie studios can struggle to get nominated, despite often very high levels of critical acclaim. The Game Awards has never nominated more than one game in both its Independent Game and GOTY categories. Hollow Knight wasn’t nominated. Nor were Stardew Valley, Undertale, Firewatch, or Outer Wilds, to choose just some of the most glaring examples.
So the argument for increasing the field of GOTY nominees to 10 isn’t about reflecting a mass audience’s taste back at them — that is already happening. Instead, it’s about shining a light on smaller games that might have escaped that audience’s attention but really deserve it, and on developers for whom it can make a massive difference. Unlike the choice faced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it’s not an existential question for The Game Awards itself, which doesn’t have to worry about its broader cultural relevance (in this respect, anyway). It’s more an opportunity to burnish its artistic credibility, and to share the love with a wider spectrum of the game industry.
Put it that way, and it’s hard to see why the event’s owner and emcee Geoff Keighley and The Game Awards board wouldn’t want to do it, apart from the concern that it might devalue nominations. But it’s also true that only they know which games are currently ending up in those 7-10 slots, and what an expanded category would really look like. If it wasn’t substantially more diverse, or if it let too many mediocre games through — and there’s every chance either or both could be true — then that would be both embarrassing and harmful, to the awards, to the voting jury, and to gaming as a whole. We’ll never know, so for now, we’ll just have to trust their judgment.
