Since its inception, a large part of the buzz surrounding The Game Awards has been centered on the games that weren't nominated and the nominees who were "snubbed" from winning categories that fans believe that they should have won. The culture surrounding these losses has grown so large that Geoff Keighley has begun acknowledging them during the awards show itself, last night encouraging YouTube creators to make Shorts discussing the games that they think wrongfully lost using #GotShorted. While gaming enthusiasts can argue all day about which games deserved to win which categories, it seems as if one thing got inarguably snubbed from the show: the major reveals.
While there were plenty of "World Premieres" during this year's Game Awards, it feels as if the 2021 show was a little underwhelming in terms of major announcements and reveals. Not every show needs to be packed with non-stop mind-blowing trailers, though this year's show felt light on the notable announcement front. Instead of leaning into other elements that could make the show memorable, like extending the actual award ceremony aspect of things, the awards marched on as a three-and-a-half-hour showcase of not much at all.
The Problem With Game Awards Hype
It's important to note that saying that there was a lack of major announcements from last night's show doesn't mean that nothing was announced, far from it: a lot of people put a lot of hard work into getting over three hours of trailers ready, but that doesn't mean that the scale of many of the announcements was exactly what it was hyped up to be. Expectations going into video game showcases are always unreasonably high, to the point where many presenters and companies feel the need to clarify exactly what types of reveals and announcements will be happening beforehand to help temper expectations. With The Game Awards this year, it feels as if the exact opposite was true.
Asking gaming fans to commit to watching a three-hour awards show isn't the easiest thing in the world, so to get fans in the door, the show was hyped up beforehand with promises of the biggest reveals of the year. That's not necessarily hard to believe, as The Game Awards has hosted plenty of major reveals in the past, but this year Geoff Keighley specifically said in an interview with USA Today that there were "four or five" announcements at the same level as the new Elden Ring trailer that he premiered at the Summer Games Fest earlier this year. After watching last night's show, however, many fans have been left wondering what he was referring to as they could count perhaps one or two major announcements, but nothing quite to that scale and certainly not "four or five" reveals comparable to Elden Ring.
Because of these high expectations set by The Game Awards themselves, fans began thinking about what could possibly be shown during the event that could rival the Elden Ring reveal, so they began looking to major companies who have promised more information on their projects at some point in 2022. Speculation began growing that studios such as Square Enix with Final Fantasy 16 or Nintendo with Metroid Prime 4 would be having major reveals based on promises from earlier in the year, only to be let down following the conclusion of the show. It's hard to imagine a three-hour show being packed end-to-end with major "wishlist" game announcements, but the show was essentially marketing itself as potentially being something of that caliber.
At the end of the day, this year's Game Awards was fun to watch, but nothing entirely memorable was revealed making it frustrating for those who were trusting that it would be full of the banger announcements that it was promised to have. It feels as if the true snub of the evening was actually the announcements, as expectations were high but they ultimately didn't secure a win.
Source: USA Today
