Fan voting for The Game Awards seems to match up almost exactly with critic choices, which could mean a good night for Larian Studios.
Major disagreements between video game critics and ordinary gamers are relatively rare, at least compared to movies, but when they do happen they tend to get very nasty, with lots of strange conspiracy theories manifesting when certain games are, or are not, praised.
Given how many quality video games have been released you’d expect there to be a lot of disagreement this year, and yet the initial results of The Game Awards 2023 suggests that everyone is more or less in agreement.
And if that is true it means that Baldur’s Gate 3 is the current favourite to win not one, but two coveted Game of the Year awards.
The Game Awards are nominated and voted on by a panel of journalists from around the world, including us. However, there’s also a Players’ Voice category for a separate Game of the Year award that is 100% voted on by fans.
The Players’ Voice poll is currently open on The Game Awards website and won’t end until Thursday, November 30 at 2am GMT (so Wednesday night, essentially).
According to a poster on ResetEra, someone has set up a live tracker for the votes and this shows Baldur’s Gate 3 as being well ahead with 8.82% of the votes, followed by Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom on 6.07%. Which if you were a betting person is probably similar to how the critic vote will go.
To show just how well aligned critics and consumers are, if you remove Phantom Liberty (because it’s DLC) and replace it with Super Mario Bros. Wonder the top six Players’ Voice games are exactly the same as the six Game of the Year nominees chosen by critics.
It’s also notable that despite complaints from some fans about an ‘Xbox tax’, that sees Xbox first party games underrepresented in the awards, Starfield ranks only at number 18 in the current list – well behind the much more deserving Hi-Fi Rush at number seven.
With over a day to go, the final votes could still change considerably, but it’s fascinating to see how similar they seem to be to the critics’ choices, at this stage at least.
The Game Awards are advertised as taking place on Thursday, December 7 but adjusting for time difference they’re actually 1am GMT on Friday, December 8. They’ll be shown live on YouTube, Twitch, and elsewhere and might even have the reveal trailer for GTA 6.
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