It has always been a "Which game has the bigger fan base" contest 🤷♂️
I don't think I ever agreed with the nominations or the the final winners, because they never make any sense other than through the hype and fan-base lens.
Occasionally good games get nominated for the correct categories (Terraria for Labor of Love) but it's very rare. I haven't even played any 2024 games but wanted the badge so I just nominated some off brand games that will never win.
Shadow of the erdtree all the way. People bitched so much about it being too hard. Great DLC, was not that hard compared to other souls games (the final boss was a total bastard though holy shit I died a lot)
I think The Finals is one of the more difficult shooters to wrap your head around and takes forever to get really good at. I think many people use this category "fun game where I always get my ass kicked" low skill floor high skill ceiling games.
I'm a little disappointed not to see Elite Dangerous nominated for Labor of Love. The game is ten years old, and the developers have recently been bringing in new features like it was still new.
It's unfortunate. Games don't get nominated by being apt for the category, they get nominated by being popular. Heck, last year RDR2 won in this category, and it's never had any community support beyond a bug fix patch or two.
This whole thing is a popularity contest, for the most part. No way anyone nominating or voting in these awards has played more than a few of the eligible games.
I'm surprised to see ED brought up. They gave up console players and won't even push token updates, like when they balanced engineers for PC players to reduce the grinding. Tried to get back into it but I guess it's now a legacy game and Frontier straight up bailed.
The game isn't shut down though. I can still buy their MTX stuff. That's got to count against them.
Yeah, they stopped updating the legacy PC client, too. I suspect it's in the same game world as your console, still alive and playable, but with no new content.
The new client is free, but also more resource-hungry; I guess they didn't have the budget to get it working on consoles.
I mean, fun is subjective. For a lot of people Balatro strikes just the right spot between strategy and randomness, and is very replayable. It's perfectly okay if it's not your cup of tea, though.
Outstanding visual is pretty packed this year, but I wish Nine Sols wins it. It's not even underrated, just feels like it wasn't talked much about outside of Hollow Knight enjoyers, maybe due to it launching on PC only (console version came out only recently), or perhaps due to the studio's turbulent past. More people should really give it a go.
So Palword was nominated for the Better With Friends award, meaning they are okay with it being in the awards despite being a beta, but it didn’t get nominated for GOTY.
I'm surprised to see God of War Ragnarok on the best game for Steam deck. I tried playing the first one on there and got like 15 fps. Does this somehow run better?