I posted a similar comparison to the Most Anticipated list
earlier in the thread. But it's definitely striking to filter out the shoo-ins, as you've done here, and list the titles that didn't have a giant (and in some cases years-long) marketing effort behind them, reaching a smaller but no less passionate player base. There's no question in my mind that Celeste was the big winner this year, and even as one of the bigger VR pessimists around, I was excited to see the high placement of games like Astro Bot and Tetris Effect. They had to overcome the limited reach of VR adoption to get there, which speaks to how well they satisfied that community and perhaps to a VR adoption rate here that is higher than I assumed.
In many ways, I think this is the central value of running this poll at all, along with how it incentivizes the more loquacious members of this board to turn out some interesting writing and commentary (thanks in part to the much-maligned requirement to say at least one thing of minimal substance, which is well worth keeping). To a certain extent, people on this community, an agglomeration of Sony or Nintendo partisans as they may be, are still in thrall to the big hype cycles and blockbuster releases that seem to have a place on the GOTY ballot reserved for them well in advance. But it doesn't happen in quite the
same way as anywhere else, and so what makes this whole exercise distinctive are the surprises and deviations peculiar to us, such that niche games are still able to place respectably in a popularity contest, even if there is a hard cap on them because they just can't pull the same numbers simply by meeting high expectations like the blockbusters do.
The format and rules are fine. (I admittedly have my doubts about the usefulness of presenting a "sort by metadata tag" as a series of category prizes, and whether it's really worth the time of the organizers to go through all that tagging manually, when it doesn't seem to shed light on very much and always attracts complaints and confusion; still, the problem may be with the way these are presented and explained, and not so much the process itself.) But reading through the postmortem discussions, I always get the sense that awards are invariably buried under the same immaturity as review scores, where people fuss and fidget ever so loudly about platform bias or placements that seem too high or too low, and miss the whole point of what these polls are
for—the signal in the information, not the noise.
I posted something nearly identical in
last year's results thread, amidst all the complaints about Nintendo bias, and I think it applies just as well this year with Nintendo swapped out for Sony:
Nobody denies that the demographics here cluster around a console-centric consensus where platform exclusives are still considered the major events worth talking about, just like they were at the dawn of the current Nintendo/MS/Sony era in the early 2000s. It's like those habits have never changed. (In fact, I'd say that people have their heads in the sand about how poor this is at reflecting the true diversity of the so-called "hardcore" market, or the general question of what the game industry looks like, what it's about, and what matters to the business.) But I find that I'm just not concerned
at all about a Sony or Nintendo bias. The slant is bigger than that—more precise, more substantial, more interesting to define and locate—and Sony or Nintendo have just recently alternated in rewarding it. As far as the voting goes, we have more than enough multi-console "independents" here to tip the scales either way. The lack of interest in certain genres, publishers, or platforms here that are a pretty big deal elsewhere, and the preening entitlement we often seem to have to ownership of the core-market label, are so conspicuous here that when I see the petty exchanges over whether we have a Sony bias or a Nintendo bias, I can only point and laugh.
Popular votes at any scale will never act as deliberative substitutes for jury prizes. We should fixate less on the ranks and more on the oddball peculiarities. I
never participate in these with the expectation that my tastes will be well reflected. (If I had that expectation, there would really be no point in voting.) It's more of an excuse to have a retrospective conversation, and I find it a whole lot healthier to engage with the process that way.