Geoff Keighley redeemed himself with his tenth anniversary show for The Game Awards. It was an evening full of memorable moments, new game trailers and well-deserved awards.
I was in the Peacock theater for more than 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 churn out 17 stories on the day of gaming’s biggest celebration.
And Keighley made up for the criticism from last year, when he was taken to task for failing to acknowledge the game industry’s layoffs, drumming award winners offstage after short times, and failing to properly protect the stage.
This year, there was plenty of stage security to stop stage rushers and ample time for speakers like Swen Vincke, who gave away the Game of the Year Award after winning that title (and getting his speech cut short) last year for Baldur’s Gate III. Vincke predicted that the best game of 2025 would be made by leaders who did not “treat developers like numbers on a spreadsheet.”
And this time, Keighley acknowledged the 34,000 industry layoffs in the past 2.5 years and he gave the first-ever Game Changer award to Amir Satvat, a single person who has made such a difference in enabling so many developers to get work.
Satvat helped more than 3,000 people find jobs by creating easily accessible job resources that aggregated all the open jobs in the game industry. The emotional Satvat declared that you can’t make great games without great people, and that his parents taught him that his value lies in how he treats other people. He took these notions to heart as he created spreadsheets and more to serve jobs to devs.
The other great thing about Keighley’s show was that he brought the games. For sure, the rumored Half-Life 3 wasn’t there and Rockstar Games didn’t show up with Grand Theft Auto VI. Nintendo didn’t show off its Switch 2.
But Keighley’s stage was the place where the solo developer of Balatro won a trio of awards, where Black Myth: Wukong won multiple awards that showcased the development prowess of China 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 glad 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 sci-fi game featuring a bald woman character that some feeble minds are going to call “woke.”
The graphics were amazingly realistic, but there were odd 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 it, Naughty Dog has a reputation for triple-A greatness to uphold.
But Intergalactic was not the best trailer for a new game at the show, perhaps because it spent a bit too much time showing how the woman shaved her head.
The Witcher 4’s trailer told an moving, graphic and cinematic story in such a short time, highlighting the woman Witcher Ciri of Cintra instead of the male lead Geralt of Rivia. Reminding me that cinematics are an art form unto themselves, the trailer depicted a scene where townsfolk offered the sacrifice of a young maiden to a “god” that was really just a monster. Ciri tried to save the woman and had an epic fight with the human-headed spider-like monster that was truly creepy. It didn’t turn out well. The ending comment was so apt: “There are no gods here, only monsters.”
The makers of Elden Ring at From Software were back with Elden Ring: Nightreign, a new co-op game in the benighted world of Elden Ring for folks like me who can’t finish such games on my own.
I was also gleeful to see the appearance of celebrities like Harrison Ford, who cracked a joke alongside voice actor Troy Baker, who played the lead 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 between the industries. AGBO, started by the Russo brothers who made the Avengers movies, worked with Neople to make Nexon’s upcoming The First Berserker: Khazan, which was sufficiently violent for gamers.
And there was Snoop Dogg, who sang a song from his new album that dropped the very same night. It’s once again an example of how getting your entertainment in front of gamers, whether from the Fallout TV show or Snoop Dogg’s new work, is a great way to market your product. Sadly, Snoop did not show off a new game.
But there were gaming superstars there too. And Josef Fares, founder of Hazelight and maker of 2021’s game of the year, It Takes Two, was back with another co-op, splitscreen buddy title dubbed Split Fiction. He said the team “fucks shit up without fucking things up,” and that development philosophy led to the game, where players jump in and out of science fiction and fantasy worlds in order to solve puzzles. The part about the farting pigs made me laugh.
Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software, showed off Borderlands 4 for the first time, hopefully redeeming the brand after the disastrous movie Borderlands from this summer. 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 that depicted the origins of a “made” man and the rise of the mafia in Sicily in the early 1900s. It was a compelling scene with interesting characters and brutal choreographed violence.
And I enjoyed seeing seasoned game developer Warren Spector and his OtherSide Entertainment studio drop a trailer for Thick As Thieves, which takes the innovative stealth gameplay of Thief (pioneered by Spector and crew in the late 1990s and early 2000s) to the next level with the emergent gameplay of four humans pitted against each other in competitive multiplayer.
Lastly, it was liberating to see Wargaming, a company that has thrived on live services titles like World of Tanks and World of Warships, show up with an original intellectual property, Steel Hunters, a sci-fi mech game. It shows the industry can still pull off new game projects without being restrained by the Innovator’s Dilemma.
It was a wonderful day for the game industry, which still has to catch its breath after so many studio closures and layoffs in the past 2.5 years. Let’s hope that one good day leads to another, and one good showing of The Game Awards leads to many others as well.
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