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.
If I won game of the year and was dedicating the award to a member of my team who had died during development and saw the words “Please wrap it up” I’d be fucking pissed #TheGameAwards pic.twitter.com/be0hLfmfT2December 8, 2023
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.
