If you’ve been browsing social media in the past week, you’ll know that The Game Awards is almost here. Actually, the award show is tomorrow as of writing, and one of the things that have caught the eyes of most players is the Player’s choice category.
The Game Awards is an award show hosted yearly by Geoff Keighley, a prolific journalist, presenter, and a big advocate of Doritos and Mountain Dew. Each year fans can vote in a variety of game categories from Best Narrative, Best Performance, and this time, the Player’s Choice category for players to show their support for what they feel is their Game of the Year.
During this time, a hotly debated topic is whether or not fans have been rigging the votes of the game awards with bots, as Genshin Impact and Sonic Frontiers have consistently been vying for the top spot, even surpassing goliaths like Elden Ring and God of War: Ragnarok.
While you can attribute the votes to just some very passionate fans wanting to support their games, others have claimed that Genshin fans are botting the game awards, or are particularly passionate about voting because as always, it’s for free Primogems. This is supported since last year Genshin also won an award category at The Game Awards, and recently the game started handing out Primogems for taking Top Honours at the Playstation Partner Awards.
The voting war between both games has gotten so intense that they’ve both completely outshined the other contenders, leaving them at nearly single digits % in terms of votes.
As hilarious as it may look at a glance to see Genshin Impact and Sonic Frontiers dwarf what many thoughts were the year’s clear winners, it does beg the question of how much fan votes matter, and could this sour every succeeding Game Awards after this, if gacha players are just going to bot vote their favourite game for free stuff?
▍Will Genshin Win at The Game Awards?
Probably not. Or at least the fan votes won’t be the deciding factor in the other categories.
As stated on The Game Awards’ official website, player votes account for 10% of the results, while the remaining 90% is dependent on the votes from the Jury. It even answered that player votes don’t represent 100% of the results, due to a variety of factors including multi-platform titles, exclusivity, and other factors, stating that the winner cannot be “socially engineered in any way”.
Geoff Keighley publically stated at an AMA his thoughts on the matter, stating that thinks it’s some very passionate fans, but further iterating on his stance as to why the fan votes are not the driving factor to winning the game awards.
So even though support for the Player’s Choice and other categories may be in Genshin’s favour, it probably won’t be the deciding factor in its official Game Award categories with a jury. It’s still quite a spectacle to see a 2020 mobile game and the latest entry in the Sonic series to be outvoting games like God of War and Elden Ring. In my opinion, I think Genshin has picked up so many fans over the last two years that it has a big chunk of votes isn’t too surprising, whether they’re doing it for Primos or not is another topic entirely.
But since Genshin Impact is once again in the running for Best Mobile Game against the critically panned Diablo Immortal, Apex Legends Mobile, Marvel Snap, and Tower of Fantasy, there’s hope for Genshin Impact fans to cash in on more free Primogems before the end of the year.
Though this may be a reality check to The Game Awards going forward when it comes to gacha games, since HoYoverse has little incentive to tell fans to not vote.
