What's supposed to be GOTY quality? I don't like narrative heavy hollywood filmic style third person action games often backed by super high budgets. The years where that's the best games are not good years for me. This year has been good for me. People love Balatro and Astro Bot. What's wrong with that? To me it feels like backlash from media members to nominations would be because of the lack of traffic those games would bring their sites. Balatro, unexpected indie success. Not able to take advantage of pre-release marketing hype and traditional games media isn't well suited for the kind of content that people engage with for games like Balatro, Helldivers 2, Palworld, etc. Checked sales estimates and Balatro maybe sold 2 million on Steam before adding in any other platforms.
FFVII Rebirth, not as popular as the industry had hoped but I bet if it sold over 15 million the media would be head over heels for 2024. Black Myth Wukong, not popular with traditional games media but popular in general but a developer that doesn't engage with western media much so not good for website content. Metaphor: ReFantazio beloved by gamers but I feel like ever since the 360 era Xbox Arcade, traditional western games media has no idea how to drive engage with articles on JRPGs. Most popular games, internet culture seems to graviate to indenpendant youtubers, twitch streamers, reddit, and tiktok. The only nominee that seemed beloved by traditional games media was FFVII Rebirth and that wasn't as popular as I bet they had hoped for their websites and it's practically the only JRPG that has production values and a marketing budget that give these sites/orgs traffic/funding to exist. Unfocused catch all video game media sites have struggled with being relevant with gamers since Starcraft 2 competitive broke out big and then Legaue of Legends as well as surprise indie hits mostly existing as word of mouth successes rather than IGN feature preview article. Then this year one of the biggest games being Zenless Zone Zero being obvious that it was going to be a hit but a kind of game IGN would have practically no cultural relevance in