Geoff Keighley agrees that The Game Awards winners were played off too quickly, but says "no one was actually cut off"

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"I asked our team to relax that rule as the show went on"

Larian CEO accepts an award for Baldur's Gate 3 while wearing armor
(Image credit: Larian / The Game Awards)

One of the biggest criticisms of The Game Awards last night was that winners were played off the stage, and showrunner Geoff Keighley agrees that this is "something to address."

"I do agree that the music was played too fast for award winners this year, and I asked our team to relax that rule as the show went on," Keighley said in a tweet after soliciting feedback on the show. "While no one was actually cut off, it’s something to address going forward."

Awards shows pretty much universally start playing music when the producers feel an acceptance speech is going on too long, and The Game Awards is no exception. The difference with The Game Awards, of course, is that it's as much marketing palooza as awards ceremony, and time that could've been spent allowing game developers to celebrate their victories was instead allocated to celebrity comedy bits and big budget trailers.

Last year, God of War actor Christopher Judge made a now-infamous eight minute acceptance speech for his best performance award, a moment he got the opportunity to crack some jokes about this year. This year's uber-fast efforts to get recipients off stage were an apparent response to that, but this was pretty much universally criticized by viewers and attendees. It came to a head when the Baldur's Gate 3 devs accepted their GOTY award and got the 'please wrap it up' sign as the team was paying tribute to a developer who had passed away. 

Here's hoping that The Game Awards finds a better balance between its duties as awards show and marketing event next year - but admittedly we've been waiting for that balance to settle in for a full decade now. 

If you missed the show, here's everything announced at The Game Awards 2023.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.