During a recent live Q&A on Twitch, producer and host of The Game Awards revealed quite a few details about this year’s show, including its potential length, as well as the fact that it will have increased security. Keighly also spoke about other things about the show, including the fact that discussions were had about new categories being added to The Game Awards.
When asked if there were plans to add more award categories, Keighly stated that some of the potential ideas for new categories that were discussed include Best DLC and Best Remake or Remaster. However, especially in the case of the latter, Keighly believes that the lack of a steady number of high quality remakes coming out would be a detriment to the category.
“Nothing new this year,” said Keighly when asked about potential new categories at The Game Awards, as caught by VGC. “I’ve seen people online saying ‘why don’t you have a Best DLC category’, which is kind of like the Ongoing Game category.”
“Typically that’s been live service games, but this year Cyberpunk 2077 is nominated, and when people ask why it’s nominated – well, because they improved the base game in a big way with version 2.0 and Phantom Liberty. So that’s sort of in that category.”
For context, the Best Ongoing Game category has historically been taken up by live-service games like Destiny 2 or The Division, as well as by long-running MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14. This year, however, marks a big difference thanks to the fact that single-player title Cyberpunk 2077 is also one of the nominees in the category.
“The other thing people always ask is why don’t we have a Best Remake or Remaster category. We’ve talked about it. I think the question is, are there five amazing remakes every year?
“Some years there are – there were some amazing ones this year, obviously Resident Evil 4 is nominated for Game of the Year. Dead Space, a bunch of other good ones that came out this year. And the question also then is would those remakes not be eligible for Game of the Year?
“So yeah, nothing new this year category-wise but it’s definitely something that we talk about every year, and try to evaluate the best way to go about that.”
Another potential new category that Keighly talks about is a Best Supporting Actor. The idea for the category comes from the fact that most games often only get a chance to nominate one or two characters for the Best Performance category, which often leads to protagonists getting most of the credit and side-characters often going ignored.
Keighly states that, while the category has been discussed, there would be pros and cons to its addition, namely the fact that The Game Awards has already seen complaints about being focused primarily on narrative aspects of video games, and not being focused enough on the gameplay side of things.
“We’ve talked about it,” said Keighly. “There are lots of great performances.
“On the other side, we do have some people who say ‘you guys focus a bit too much on the narrative aspects of games’, and ‘you’re too much like the Oscars, you have writing and acting and those types of awards, and you should be focused more on gameplay driven things’.
“Supporting Performance is something we’ve definitely thought about. I’m proud that our acting award has always been gender neutral. We started in 2014, we don’t have Actor and Actress [awards], we really just blend them into one acting category, which I think was the right call we made back in the day.
“So yeah, we’ve talked about it. No plans this year, but it’s definitely something that has been brought up before.”
The Game Awards 2023 is slated to take place on December 7, and as is traditionally the case, we’ll likely see a few video game announcements at the event, such as the Baldur’s Gate 3 Xbox Series X/S release date, the next major update for Warframe, and maybe even a sequel to Death Stranding.
