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Wild Picks From GM GOTY Awards History
Issue 11 (beta get used to this) - Week of 17 December 2024
Gamer Matters
December 17, 2024
Greetings, gamer…
Meck is back for this issue of Previously On Gamer Matters. The newsletter is supposedly tailored to get you up to speed, “the catch-up mechanic you need”, on gaming news, but have you caught up on your Gamer Matters lore?
With the Gamer Malaya and Gamer Matters Game Of The Year Awards (GM GOTY Awards) 2024 on the horizon, and with video game awards season in full swing, I invite you all for a short view into the past…
Table of Contents
Cover of Floral Shoppe, the seminal vaporwave album by Vektroid (under the alias Macintosh Plus)
Ever since Gamer Matters’ proper inception in 2017, the GM GOTY Awards had some wild picks for winners. Here’s some extra tidbits and anecdotes on why they won these awards.
2017: Best Racing Game: Sonic And All-Stars Racing Transformed
Best Racing game was supposed to be the “serious” award category. It’s the only genre-based award. Half of the team are proper gearheads and love racing games. Yet ever since its inception we keep on making meme choices. Like this one.
It’s not even a 2017 game, but Gran Turismo Sport and Forza Horizon 3 (both stellar games) has myriad of issues relating to live service and online-only connection. Today, you can’t buy Forza Horizon 3, and GT Sport loses the meaning of its subtitle as the game servers are gont (but at least you can play it still). It’s a meme winner, but maybe it does deserved it…
2018: Trashfire Award: Fallout 76
This is the first year this award carried its hallowed name (and yes, it’s specifically spelt that way for SEO reasons), and Danial went in deep on why he’s so passionate about this last week.
Fast-forward today and Fallout 76 is, somehow, very well alive. It may be janky and not found favour to the mainstream variety gamer demographic it aimed for, but found a niche following, enough to justify regular free content updates (with microtransactions on the side). An impressive, unending fire.
We stopped awarding Trashfire “winners” but continue to shortlist five of the disappointing fails of the year.
2019: Best Meme Generator: Untitled Goose Game
If we totally leaned on our biases, Death Stranding should’ve won. Because we directly contributed. It’s the only time to date we ever went viral. So far.
2020: Best Meme Generator: Yakuza
For context, Best Meme Generator is the award for “the best games that dominated our conversations, social media, and shitposts throughout the year.”
The Yakuza/Like A Dragon series, up to this point of time, is something we only seen from afar, so we keep on seeing them appearing here year after year.
To avoid that from happening ever again, we give this award to the entire series and ban them from ever appearing again, because Yakuza/Like A Dragon will always have a chance to appear every year. That game series in general is insane.
2021: Best Indie Game: Chivalry 2
While everyone was on the discourse of “what is considered an indie game” thanks to Dave The Diver last year, we already had that same discussion years beforehand.
Given Chivalry 2 boasts what one would consider AAA graphics, we had to define what, for Gamer Matters is considered an indie game. And the most important aspect of it all was this nebulous “indie spirit”. If a game attempts to do something different that the current trends of the AAA games industry, it can be considered an indie game. Size of a studio matters too.
The definition has since gotten a bit of an update in lieu of that discourse, as previously we would allow indie labels associated with AAA publishers.
Also, we got featured on Chivalry 2’s GOTY accolades video, which was cool. There’s a typo, but hey, we take what we can get.
2022: Best Game We Didn’t Play: Elden Ring
This is the wildest pick of them all. 2022, hands down, has the obvious pick among all media outlets. And yet, Elden Ring is relegated here.
And it’s the only one too.
As a small, independent outlet that started out from nothing, we don’t have that many connections with the various publishers (and/or the PR firms that represent them). So it was sort of nice, and also embarrassing, that when we eventually did got in touch with the folks at Bandai Namco and they gave us codes for Elden Ring, months after launch. After specifically reading this feature.
We’ve since retired this award category.
2023: Best Horror Game [Wildcard]: Dead Space (2023)
The Elden Ring effect meant that there’s a blank column in our spreadsheet where keep track of our GOTY Awards nominations. And in that wake, we introduced the wildcard category, which will change every year.
But here’s a little teaser: that’s not the only award category that’s changed this year. Something rather major happened.
Vote!
Every year, we have a new graphics style that adorns our GOTY Awards showcase, as you can see. Do you have a favourite? Head down here and cast a quick vote!
Credit: Avaresst
Our hands are all on deck in preparing GM GOTY Awards 2024. And there’s not much news (unless you consider those Switch 2 leaks real) that we think is worth catching up on.
Here’s a funny link that can wash away/bring back awful memories of the recent blast Shopee ads.
As usual, we’ll be revealing the winners of the GM GOTY Awards 2024 starting December 21. So stay tuned and see how our list looks like when compared to other outlets doing the same. It’s been a good year for video games! Not so much for game devs, which sucks.
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Play games and have fun,
—Meck and the Gamer Matters Team