How The Game Awards voting works

Over the past 10 years, The Game Awards has become the go-to awards show for recognizing the best of the best video games, thanks to its splashy presentation, celebrity appearances, and exclusive reveals secured by the show’s host and creator, Geoff Keighley. The Game Awards is also known for its actual awards, though they often take a backseat to the spectacle.

That’s not unheard for awards shows, which often focus on entertainment, not on acceptance speeches from the winners themselves. But the awards are still a huge part of The Game Awards, especially for the artists, performers, designers, and producers who are nominated each year.

Who votes for The Game Awards nominees and winners may not be obvious to viewers of the show itself. But organizers behind The Game Awards are pretty transparent about who’s behind the awards nomination process and who decides the winners. (Hint: It’s not Geoff Keighley.)

What’s less clear is who is responsible for tabulating the votes for various awards as the show increases in prominence and influence over the years.

Who votes for The Game Awards?

Since its inception, The Game Awards has relied on a jury of traditional media outlets and influencers to decide which games get nominated and which games ultimately win their respective categories.

In 2014, just 28 individual members of the games media decided the winners for the inaugural TGAs. The size of the voting jury has more than tripled over the past decade, shifting in size and makeup as new influencers come to prominence and media outlets fold.

For 2024, the voting jury consists of more than 100 publications — including Polygon — and influencers across the globe who have been “selected for their history of critical video game evaluation,” according to the show’s organizers. The voting jury includes representation from more than 30 countries.

Here’s how the nomination process works, according to The Game Awards’ FAQ:

Each voting outlet completes a confidential, unranked ballot based on the collective and diverse opinion of its entire editorial staff, listing out its top five choices in each category. Ballots are tabulated, and the five games that appear on the most ballots are put forth as nominees. In the event of a tie, six (or more) nominees will be announced in a category.

Voting is handled in a similar fashion. Outlets and influencers vote on the nominees, using one ballot per outlet.

The Game Awards also has separate, specialized voting juries for esports and accessibility awards categories.

Who tabulates the votes for The Game Awards?

Mainstream media outlets like to cast The Game Awards as video gaming’s Oscars. That may be true purely for its spectacle, but based on how the nominees and winners are decided, it’s an inapt comparison.

The Game Awards is more similar to the Critics’ Choice and Golden Globes. Those Hollywood awards shows are voted upon by professional media critics, unlike the Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys, which are decided by members of their respective academies composed of entertainment industry professionals. (The closest comp for games might be the GDC Awards, held each year in March.)

If you’ve ever watched the Oscars or the Emmys, you’ve probably seen members of an accounting firm, like PricewaterhouseCoopers or Ernst & Young, getting their obligated screen time. These accounting firms are tasked with verifying the authenticity of the votes to present a level playing field and dispel any sense of impropriety born of outside influence.

The accounting firms that tabulate the votes that decide the Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys are often dealing with tens of thousands of votes that will decide the winners. In the case of The Game Awards, the main voting body consists of a little over 100 votes.

The Game Awards organizers haven’t made it clear who is responsible for tabulating and ensuring the sanctity of the press and public’s voting, however. We’ve asked the organizers for clarification, but Geoff Keighley declined our requests for an interview around the awards’ voting process. Polygon has reached out to representatives for the show multiple times to ask who tabulates the tens of thousands of votes that decide or influence certain awards, but we have not received a response.

Why doesn’t the public vote on The Game Awards?

To some degree it does. Winners are determined by blended vote between the voting jury — which accounts for 90% of the vote — and public fan voting — which accounts for 10% of the vote. So while the public can sway a vote, it can only influence the results to a certain extent. The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley said in the past that he’d “toyed with public voting” for the awards, but had concerns about “social engineering” and turning voting into a “a popularity contest [that] isn’t really fair to first-party games. Those titles naturally have a smaller addressable audience base.”

There is one purely fan-voted category for The Game Awards, however. It’s called Players’ Voice, and is entirely decided upon by the public over the course of three rounds of voting. Players’ Voice was introduced in 2019. Prior to that, fans could vote in the esports player, esports team and most anticipated game categories.
Unlike some other game awards shows, like the Game Developers Choice Awards and DICE Awards, game developers themselves don’t vote on The Game Awards. According to Keighley, “Peer-based voting in gaming is tough — most developers don’t have time to play all the games right when they come out, they are too busy making them. So we prefer our approach. But always open to tweaking.”