The best of The Game Awards and the redemption of Geoff Keighley | The rhythm of the dean

Geoff Keighley redeemed himself with The Game Awards 10th Anniversary Show. It was an evening filled with memorable moments, new game trailers, and well-deserved prizes.

I was at the Peacock Theater for over three hours to witness it all on Thursday night. We held our own GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games event on the same day, but I managed to produce 17 stories on the day of gaming’s biggest celebration.

And Keighley made up for criticism last year, when he was criticized for failing to acknowledge gaming industry layoffs, removing award winners from the stage after short periods of time and failing to properly protect the stage.

This year, there was plenty of security on stage to stop attackers and plenty of time for speakers like Swen Vincke, who presented the Game of the Year award after winning that title (and having his speech interrupted) last year by Baldur’s Gate III. Vincke predicted that the best game of 2025 would be created by leaders who did not “treat developers like numbers on a spreadsheet.”

And this time, Keighley recognized the industry’s 34,000 layoffs in the last two and a half years and awarded the first Game Changer Award to Amir Satvat, a single person who has made a huge difference in enabling so many developers to get jobs.

Satvat helped over 3,000 people find jobs by creating easy-to-access job resources that aggregated all vacant positions in the gaming industry. The emotional Satvat stated that you can’t make great games without great people, and that his parents taught him that his value lies in how he treats others. He took these notions to heart as he created spreadsheets and more to offer jobs to developers.

The other great thing about the Keighley program was that it brought the games. Surely, the rumored Half-Life 3 wasn’t there and Rockstar Games didn’t come out with Grand Theft Auto VI. Nintendo did not show its Switch 2.

But the Keighley stage was where Balatro’s solo developer won a trio of awards, with Black Myth: Wukong winning multiple awards that showcased China’s development prowess and secured a place on the global stage for Chinese culture. And where Team Asobi showed everyone that a simple 3D platformer, Astro Bot, could win Game of the Year. As a big fan of Senua, I was happy to see Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II win for best audio design and Melina Juergens win for best performance (for an unprecedented second time).

Naughty Dog debuted a new intellectual property, its first new game franchise since The Last of Us came out 11 years ago in 2013. The title, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, was a science fiction game starring a bald woman character that some weak minds will call “woke.”

The graphics were incredibly realistic, but there were strange product placements like the word “Porsche” on the back of a spaceship. With titles like Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter, Uncharted and The Last of Us behind them, Naughty Dog has a reputation for triple-A greatness to maintain.

But Intergalactic wasn’t the best trailer for a new game at the show, perhaps because it spent too much time showing how the woman shaved her head.

The Witcher 4 trailer told a moving, graphic and cinematic story in such a short time, highlighting the female Witcher Ciri of Cintra instead of the male protagonist Geralt of Rivia. Reminding me that cinematics are an art form in themselves, the trailer showed a scene in which the townspeople offered the sacrifice of a young maiden to a “god” who was really just a monster. Ciri tried to save the woman and had an epic fight with the spider-like monster with a human head that was really creepy. It didn’t go well. The final comment was very accurate: “There are no gods here, only monsters.”

The creators of Elden Ring at From Software are back with Elden Ring: Nightreign, a new cooperative game in the ignorant world of Elden Ring for people like me who can’t finish those games on my own.

I was also happy to see the appearance of celebrities like Harrison Ford, who made a joke alongside voice actor Troy Baker, who played the lead role in the wonderful Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (which came out too late in the year to win any awards ). ).

In light of our Hollywood and Games event, it was nice to see so many collaborations across industries. AGBO, founded by the Russo brothers who made the Avengers movies, worked with Neople to make Nexon’s upcoming The First Berserker: Khazan, which was violent enough for gamers.

And there was Snoop Dogg, who sang a song from his new album that came out that same night. Once again, it’s an example of how presenting your entertainment to gamers, whether it’s from the Fallout TV show or Snoop Dogg’s new work, is a great way to market your product. Unfortunately, Snoop didn’t show off any new gameplay.

But there were video game superstars there too. And Josef Fares, founder of Hazelight and creator of the 2021 game of the year, It Takes Two, returned with another split-screen cooperative title called Split Fiction. He said the team “fucks shit up without ruining things” and that development philosophy led to the game, where players pop in and out of sci-fi and fantasy worlds to solve puzzles. The part about the pigs farting made me laugh.

Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software, showed off Borderlands 4 for the first time, hoping to redeem the brand after this summer’s disastrous Borderlands movie. It looked great, even with its familiar stylistic graphics, like a comic book come to life.

Hangar 13’s Mafia: The Old Country released a trailer depicting the origins of a “made” man and the rise of the mafia in Sicily in the early 20th century. It was a compelling scene with interesting characters and brutal choreographed violence.

And I enjoyed watching seasoned game developer Warren Spector and his studio OtherSide Entertainment release a trailer for Thick As Thieves, which brings Thief’s innovative stealth gameplay (pioneered by Spector and his team in the late ’90s and early ’00s) to the Next level with the emerging game of four humans facing each other in a competitive multiplayer mode.

Finally, it was liberating to see Wargaming, a company that has thrived with live service titles like World of Tanks and World of Warships, come out with an original IP, Steel Hunters, a sci-fi mech game. This shows that the industry can still carry out new game projects without being limited by the innovator’s dilemma.

It was a wonderful day for the video game industry, which has yet to catch its breath after so many studio closures and layoffs over the past two and a half years. Let’s hope that one good day leads to another, and that a good performance from The Game Awards leads to many others as well.