TGA 2024 predictions, reactions, nominees, etc.

[Johnny Novgorod]

I've heard it said there's a slight anti Japanese/eastern game bias when it comes to handing out game awards

I don't know about that, 3 of the last 7 GOTY Awards went to Japanese games (BotW, Sekiro, Elden Ring). If a Japanese game takes it this year that'll be 4 out of 11 total. Not a majority but not nearly enough to make me call bullshit.

Maybe it's like how the Nobel typically favors Swedish candidates, or at least it used to near its inception.

Edit: Math

 

[CriticalGaming]

I do agree that Western games are in a rut though, mainly because much of the Western game talent has simply retired from any major studio and the people they've been replaced with seem incapable of separating their creation of games from their political ideologies and their desire to tear down any and all well known characters and franchises.

Red Letter Media had a clip where the guy is like, "How does it feel to live long enough to watch all your beloved franchises go up in flames?"

And that certainly seems to be the case, in the sense that the new people put in charge of these properties almost seem resentful of the success those properties hold. So now they are trying to inject their mindsets into this stuff and it's bouncing off the audience really hard. We've seen it with Marvel, Star Wars, DC, many game studios, where these people talk about the property like, "We are going to change it to be what we want." etc. The Witcher show runners famously hated the original material and forced changed it to reflect nothing of what the audience expects from the property.

Now Dragonage, Suicide Squad, are the big examples from the games industry that are taking games that people used to like and twisting it into something different and terrible. To the point where not even basic game qualities are even redeemable. Squad's gameplay is exceptionally generic and unremarkable, Dragonage's gameplay is just basic and combined with systems that don't work together well. Nevermind story and writing and the treatment of characters, the game's themselves aren't good.

 

[BrawlMan]

now its the western industry that's in a complete rut. Their marketing strategies aren't working, they're counter productively abandoning what they are good at and rather than being seen as a mark of quality a western AAA game now invites distrust, mockery and skepticism.

Its not even that the market changed and that the companies on both sides of the isle weren't able to keep up either. Back at the time Japanese companies tried westernizing so hard there was still great demand for the games they used to make, the market just wasn't making those games. Same with the western industry. There is still high demand for quality single player games and when they release they tend to succeed. A real sequel to Black Flag or the Arkam games would have been met with great applause, but devs seem all but forbidden from making those games anymore.

In addition, The

creation of games from their political ideologies and their desire to tear down any and all well known characters and franchises.

Cut that bullshit. That's not the major problem and more of a symptom than anything else. At the end of the day: It's just plain greed from those at the very top and throwing whoever in charge of a project, regardless of experience and quality. Not to mention many of the AAA west are too focused on just screwing consumers over with life service bullshit. The AAA west are too addicted to screwing people over and having all the money instead of some of the .

You got plenty from the western side that are AA and indie that can do politics fine or are not the major focus of their games. At least with most indies, the subject matter comes from the developers or creators own background(s). Be they people of color, LGBTQ, different religions, cultures, etc. They take creative risks because most don't need nor have to worry about shareholders nor appealing to every single person on the Earth.

 

[Hades]

I do agree that Western games are in a rut though, mainly because much of the Western game talent has simply retired from any major studio and the people they've been replaced with seem incapable of separating their creation of games from their political ideologies and their desire to tear down any and all well known characters and franchises.

I'd put it less aggressively then Brawlman, but I think you're going to have a very hard time convincing anyone that Black Flag, the Avengers and Concord secretly failed not because they were entirely build around a discredited and outdated live service system, but because it was ''woke'' instead.

I think its also curious the pendulum never swings the other way. Games that have all the reason in the world to fail can ''only'' fail because they're secretly woke, but games that have all the reason in the world to succeed don't secretly succeed because they're woke. No one argued Overwatch 1 or Hades succeeded entirely because they were woke. Instead people argued correctly that they succeeded for being good games that appealed to their sector of the market very well. But when games are shit that poorly cater to a shit part of the market then they only fail because they're secretly woke. Kinda weird. If its alleged presence can single handily break a game it should also single handily make a game if its just THAT important.

 

[CriticalGaming]

You got plenty from the western side that are AA and indie that can do politics fine or are not the major focus of their games.

That is how it should be. But that isn't what the AAA space is doing.

At the end of the day: It's just plain greed from those at the very top and throwing whoever in charge of a project, regardless of experience and quality.

I don't think this is necessarily a result of greed of any sort. Entertainment companies have to make entertainment, so Disney making more Star Wars whatever is not about greed, it's literally their whole business to make content. They are absolutely not vetting the people they are putting in charge of these projects though, that much is clear and I don't know why.

But it isn't greed. Think about it logically. If it was greed, they would want to make the most money possible, and throwing some random dipshit that fucks up the show/game/movie is not going to make money. Why would they tolerate all these loses if all they cared about was the greed of it all? Make it make sense.

Be they people of color, LGBTQ, different religions, cultures, etc. They take creative risks because most don't need nor have to worry about shareholders nor appealing to every single person on the Earth.

And yet even these relatively small projects fail. You are correct that they don't have to make all the money in the world, but they do have to make SOME money. Whether it's Tales of Kenzera: Zau, a game that didn't sell to the point of the studio going on hiatus because of a lack of funding. Or it's Dustborn with it's roughly 8000 copies sold, it was the first game the studio made in 8 years and was funded by the Norwegian Government for 1.5 million, an investment the government will not get back. Though Red Thread Studios continues to get funding from the government. Unknown 9 Awakening also another game that seems to be unable to live off it's diverse appeal.

This stuff isn't working and while a passion project is fine if you can eat the cost of making it, even small projects have to generate some appeal to make their money back. Small developers have to eat and pay rent too.

BrawlMan I understand you have a big hatred of corporations and the AAA industry in general, but not everything is as cut and dry as your "Fuck them greedy fuckers" attitude makes it out to be. And the smaller indie studios have just as many problems and responsibilities when it comes to generating revenue as the big companies, they just get away with it on a smaller scale.

 

[BrawlMan]

I'd put it less aggressively then Brawlman, but I think you're going to have a very hard time convincing anyone that Black Flag, the Avengers and Concord secretly failed not because they were entirely build around a discredited and outdated live service system, but because it was ''woke'' instead.

The only reason I'm so aggressive about is because he keeps falling into this dumb trap maybe by grifters, and as a complete lie and he knows it. Critical will rarely ever admit it though, or only after the evidence is clear as day, and he has nothing else to fall back on.

think its also curious the pendulum never swings the other way. Games that have all the reason in the world to fail can ''only'' fail because they're secretly woke, but games that have all the reason in the world to succeed don't secretly succeed because they're woke. No one argued Overwatch 1 or Hades succeeded entirely because they were woke. Instead people argued correctly that they succeeded for being good games that appealed to their sector of the market very well. But when games are shit that poorly cater to a shit part of the market then they only fail because they're secretly woke. Kinda weird. If its alleged presence can single handily break a game it should also single handily make a game if its just THAT important.

Truth.

Streets of Rage, Street Fighter, and most other fighting games have been "woke" for decades

don't think this is necessarily a result of greed of any sort.

Bullshit and you know it. A majority is plain greed. All of those live services say hi. The fact Sony still hasn't stopped trying to greenlight them proves my point. I.
Don't understand how you could forget something like that. So easily and keep ignoring it. Each time it happens and has been proven more than ten times over. Says more about you and you ignore the obvious warning signs and problems.

BrawlMan I understand you have a big hatred of corporations and the AAA industry in general, but not everything is as cut and dry as your "Fuck them greedy fuckers" attitude makes it out to be.

When the boot fit is kind of hard to ignore otherwise. I know there are good AAA out there, but most of them have gotten greedy up their own ass. Yes, I know there are bad indeed that exists, but those usually fail because they're not big enough or people can see immediately what's wrong. So they're usually not worth the attention or headline unless they really screw up badly.

We're not doing this round about again. Either accept it or don't. Not my problem.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I'd put it less aggressively then Brawlman, but I think you're going to have a very hard time convincing anyone that Black Flag, the Avengers and Concord secretly failed not because they were entirely build around a discredited and outdated live service system, but because it was ''woke'' instead.

I think its also curious the pendulum never swings the other way. Games that have all the reason in the world to fail can ''only'' fail because they're secretly woke, but games that have all the reason in the world to succeed don't secretly succeed because they're woke. No one argued Overwatch 1 or Hades succeeded entirely because they were woke. Instead people argued correctly that they succeeded for being good games that appealed to their sector of the market very well. But when games are shit that poorly cater to a shit part of the market then they only fail because they're secretly woke. Kinda weird. If its alleged presence can single handily break a game it should also single handily make a game if its just THAT important.

Well I think "wokeness" is just a symptom of the overall mindset. It's a mentality that is stifling the creativity required to make entertainment actually entertaining. There were those Concord reports of "Toxic positivity" in which ideas that were known to be bad and considered bad by people making the game, couldn't be called out or criticized, which is not going to yield a very good project. The point of a team based project is to bounce ideas off of each other, give feedback and adjust those ideas so that the best possible ideas float to the top and eventually make it into the game.

I would argue that this also yields people being hired and promoted beyond their capabilities. People put in charge of projects that have no business leading a team or putting together a concrete creative vision.

Funny how we often talk about managers who don't know how to manage shit when it comes to developer crunch, but we don't really bag on these people who don't have any clue what they're doing in ANY aspect of game design or development. Nevermind time management, what about being able to put together a game design document that makes sense?

I mean fuck, Diablo 4 had developer interviews in which they admit to not doing any market research nor even doing anything to sort of research what a Isometric RPG could and should be. They admitted to thinking that they knew better and thus released Diablo 4 as a fucked mess. Where are the managers and leaders telling their team to fucking look at other shit so that they know what kind of game they are even supposed to be making. If the leaders on the project were okay with it, then why weren't the bigger higher ups going "what the fuck dude?".

It's a whole mess of unqualified people in the wrong roles, making bad decisions, and nobody doing anything to check on it.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

The idea of some sort of anti-eastern bias just seems weird to me. I don't have any evidence or convincing argument, I just see a game like Metaphor: Refantazio capture the hearts of so much of the gamers and critics, and it's a freaking jRPG. I have complained (not seriously, just to take the piss) about all the "anime bullshit" in games all over the place. When I think of games I think of Japanese/anime stuff by default now. Genshin Impact more than Call of Duty. Sure it's probably just the media I choose to consume.

But also it's seeing the kids of my relatives and friends with their Japanese animes and games. My niece like drawing and her sketch book is all anime looking stuff- but it's not "foreign" to her, it's the norm (she/we are not Japanese at all, we're collectively American and from a bunch of other cultural backgrounds).

So... I dunno... I'm just so used to Japanese (and Korean) stuff being so culturally dominant in the spaces of animation, games, toys, etc. It feels like when people were calling fantasy "nerd" stuff during the height of Game of Thrones and I was like.. no, it's no longer niche, it's the mainstream.

And then where do things like the Sony games come in- Horizons, Tsushima, Last of Us, etc- non Japanese studios on a Japanese electronics company gaming platform. The world is global, as I like to say, much to my friends' annoyance.

 

[BrawlMan]

The idea of some sort of anti-eastern bias just seems weird to me.

I know you said you weren't gaming around this time, but it unfortunately did exist in the mid to late 2000s, and carried over until the 2010s. 2015 more so. Gaming journalists especially had an ax to grind to anything that was Japanese, aside from a few exceptions. Especially If God forbid it has some t&a in it, and is meant for 17+.

Biases can still exist. Bayonetta 2 Didn't get a game of war because one of the judges felt the game was the meeting to women and "pornish". Even though that same judge has an account to a softcore porn site, the account is still active. Fucking hypocrite.

​

 

[CriticalGaming]

When the boot fit is kind of hard to ignore otherwise. I know there are good AAA out there, but most of them have gotten greedy up their own ass. Yes, I know there are bad indeed that exists, but those usually fail because they're not big enough or people can see immediately what's wrong. So they're usually not worth the attention or headline unless they really screw up badly.

You have to analyze WHY they are bad though. Beyond basic shit. We aren't usually talking about asset flips or shovelware level games on the indie side. Unknown 9 Awakening is a $60 game for some reason, Dustborn is not an asset flip and is a fairly well put together game technically but it's still bad and people are going to point at come up with reasons to why it's bad.

Same thing for AAA services, it's really easy to scoff and say "bad because live service slop". But you and I know that there are perfectly wonderful live service games out there that are perfectly fine and good. Live service isn't automatically "shit", and there are a lot of other elements in play.

 

[BrawlMan]

You have to analyze WHY they are bad though

Been done that already. All it boils down to is plain greed and going over production and trying to please shareholders who want more and more money each time. Oh fuck

It ain't about being "woke". It never once did and the term was made into a pejorative or used as an insult by those same assholes who are racist and sexists. Stop taking the words of angry racist and sexists or once in your life. They don't count for fucking shit. Even certain grifters are losing their audience or the people that "care" about them actually don't give a rat ass about them. They only care about hearing hateful things to make themselves feel better.

Woke - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

I gave you these links before. Go through them and actually read them or watch them. You'll see that you didn't follow people who cannot give a rat to ass about you. They hate on anything that's different and you know it. So I don't know why you keep feeding them or trying to spread the garbage. They "technically" don't have a point when they shoot themselves in a foot several times. Their points are either incidental or they're pulling from something that has nothing to do with anything.

 

[Ezekiel]

I've heard it said there's a slight anti Japanese/eastern game bias when it comes to handing out game awards, but this year they don't seem to have a choice. Its almost a complete eastern game industry sweep with barely a western game to be found. And while we shouldn't put that much stock in the game awards I still wonder if its not a sign of the western industry's deep decline.

Perhaps the western game industry is now going through a similar phase to what the Japanese game industry went with during the 360/ps3 era. Back in those days the marketing strategies of the Japanese companies wasn't working anymore, the devs had lost confidence and were counter productively abandoning what they were good at to appeal to the west. Generally that part of the industry was seen as a laughing stock rather than a measure of quality. This to the extend it was apparently a bit traumatic for Japanese game developers. Its no coincidence that some of Japan's most controversial and worst games came from this era.

But now its the western industry that's in a complete rut. Their marketing strategies aren't working, they're counter productively abandoning what they are good at and rather than being seen as a mark of quality a western AAA game now invites distrust, mockery and skepticism.

Its not even that the market changed and that the companies on both sides of the isle weren't able to keep up either. Back at the time Japanese companies tried westernizing so hard there was still great demand for the games they used to make, the market just wasn't making those games. Same with the western industry. There is still high demand for quality single player games and when they release they tend to succeed. A real sequel to Black Flag or the Arkam games would have been met with great applause, but devs seem all but forbidden from making those games anymore.

You know it would be called "Arkham" too, as if the Batman IP is nothing by itself and the games can't do anything but the one formula. Anyway, that era of western games sucked, is even worse played now and I have my doubts about the return of such games being very successful now.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Go through them and actually read them or watch them.

Why would I do that? You talk about grifters yet you do realize that these "grifters" exists on both sides right? You are the only person regularly linking videos here trying to get people to watch things.

So I don't know why you keep feeding them or trying to spread the garbage

Who am I feeding. I rarely mention anybody. Who's garbage am I trying to spread?

You are the only person around here who gets weirdly aggressive whenever someone says things that poke at your little bubble world. Any opinion you don't like is always met with "I don't cares" or "I'm done talking about its" or " Don't try to talk to me about this I'm DONE". And yet you ALWAYS continue to reply.

I get it, your world view isn't open for consideration. You love to shit on AAA's until AAA releases a game you like (ala DMC or something) and then suddenly the bad things "aren't that bad". It's bias, I get it, we all have them.

 

[BrawlMan]

grifters" exists on both sides right?

That is rarely ever the case, and you know it. Most are on the side of alt right assholes. It rarely has anything to do with the lefties or progressives. Especially when youtube keeps favoring the super hard core conservatives.

Who am I feeding. I rarely mention anybody. Who's garbage am I trying to spread?

Actually, you have a more than one occasion, but just not recently. This conversation's over because I'm not dragging this off-topic. Let's just keep it focused on the VGAs. Not doing this loop. Learn to actually look more than the that's something that's "woke". Because?
That's what your arguments are based on 90% of the time when it comes to this crap or why a game failed.

 

[CriticalGaming]

There was one big snub in the Game Awards nominations

TGA’s voting jury delivered a well-rounded list with one very glaring exception

www.polygon.com

Polygon mad that a good game "Black Myth Wukong" got a Nomination but Dragonage, a bad bad game, did not.
*shocked Pikachu face*

Funny thing about the article is that it mentions things the Bioware is typically good at, but fails to acknowledge or justify whether Dragonage still holds those standards. They just seemed completely ignorant of reality.

 

[Ezekiel]

Oh, and that dreadful era of western games brought us to where we are. Rocksteady releasing only Arkham Knight for that whole generation. A doomed Dead Space imitation costing 162 million dollars to make, in a genre that was never even super popular, outside of Resident Evil. Naughty Dog making two and a half games in the PS4 era (down from four in the PS3 era, and Lost Legacy used many assets from Uncharted 4).

 

[BrawlMan]

It's Polygon, what's so surprising? They've been doing this shit since 2013. They're not even worth crying about nor the attention. They've already made themselves as big a joke as IGN.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Oh, and that dreadful era of western games brought us to where we are. Rocksteady releasing only Arkham Knight for that whole generation. A doomed Dead Space imitation costing 162 million dollars to make, in a genre that was never even super popular, outside of Resident Evil. Naughty Dog making two and a half games in the PS4 era (down from four in the PS3 era, and Lost Legacy used many assets from Uncharted 4).

You seem to be covering multiple eras here lol.

 

[BrawlMan]

outside of Resident Evil.

Survival horror is doing great in the indie and AA sector. Be they Japanese or Western. Though Western portion is going really great on that end.

 

[Ezekiel]

You seem to be covering multiple eras here lol.

No, I'm talking about how the bad decisions of the PS3/X360 era affected the PS4/X1 era, with Callisto Protocol being at the tail end. Okay, maybe that one is more in the current era. It's not just the desire to make the next big online experience that has slowed single player games, but also the cost of the character-driven cinematic experience with the photorealistic graphics.

Tried Black Flag years ago. Was unplayable. Assassin's Creed has too much automation and too many systems and screens. It wants to do everything and masters nothing. Story's bland too. Overproduced trash.