This editorial was originally intended to explain why the Game
Developers Choice Awards--one of a number of events that aspire to be
seen as gaming's version of the Oscars--still aren't there yet. The
sentiment was that the GDC Awards are little more than the gaming
industry giving itself an undeserved pat on the back, championing
best-sellers and safe sequels over original, daring, and acclaimed games
that maybe didn't sell as much as they should have (for example, Catherine, Xenoblade Chronicles, Shadows of the Damned, and Bulletstorm.)
The
GDC Award nominations may be full of "safe" choices like Skyrim, but
there's not a single Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 nod in sight.
But as I looked for evidence to back up my premise, I discovered a few
things that upended my assumptions and cast the industry in a different
light. The first assumption I had was that the Oscars honor an
assortment of primarily original films every year, while the GDC Awards
pit sequel against sequel in a depressing battle of big-budget
blockbusters.
Of the 30 different games nominated for GDC Awards this year, only 12 (40 percent) are actually original games, with the remainder being sequels, reboots, or in the case of Dark Souls,
a "spiritual successor" that may as well be Demon's Souls 2. Meanwhile,
the Oscars nominated 61 different films, 50 of which (82 percent) are
original.
While the numbers differ significantly, I had expected the difference to
be even more pronounced. But it turns out the Oscars recognize sequels
in plenty of technical categories, while the GDC Awards boost the
originality with the best mobile/handheld category, as well as best
downloadable game.
In fact, the mobile and handheld markets--often derided as an endless
wasteland of copycats--injected some much-needed originality into the
nominees list. Of the dozen original titles up for GDC Awards, only L.A. Noire and El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron are boxed retail products. Of the remaining 18 sequels and derivative titles, only one of them, Infinity Blade II, can't be found on store shelves.
One of the reasons why people care about the Oscars is because they are
perceived as honoring not the most financially successful
representations of the craft, but the best. So I looked at the winners
of the GDC Award for best game and the NPD Group's annual top 10 sales
charts, expecting to find a long string of award-winners firmly nestled
among the industry's best sellers. No Oscar Best Picture winner has
finished a year in the top 10 of domestic box office receipts since The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
did it in 2003, but the GDC Award winners weren't nearly as dominant on
the sales charts as I'd assumed. Since 2005, four GDC Awards Best Game
winners failed to crack the NPD Group's annual top 10 chart: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009), Fallout 3 (2008) Portal (2007), and Shadow of the Colossus (2005). This year, only two of the five nominees for the award (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Batman: Arkham City) made the NPD's 2011 top 10, so we could easily see another game join that list.
Aside from a bit of encouragement to actually challenge your own
assumptions to see how justified they are, the takeaway here should be
that things in the game industry can seem a lot bleaker than they
actually are. It's easy to wade through news stories about unending
sequels and sales figures and come to the conclusion that the industry
is headed for a homogenized future of me-too hits made by marketing
budgets. But a closer look at the subject yielded room for optimism and
evidence of some progress for the medium as a whole. And that is most
definitely cause for a pat on the back.
Check out the Game Developers Choice Awards streaming live on GameSpot tonight starting at 6:30 p.m. Pacific.
