Our GOTY expert untangles the logic of The Game Awards

This year Polygon launched GOTY Watch, led by our senior editor Oli Welsh. The section — separate from our own Game of the Year picks, coming soon — is a home for analysis of upcoming Game of the Year contests and awards shows, including the most notable one, the annual Game Awards in December. Styled after the Oscars and the Emmys, the Game Awards is an increasingly formal event with ever-stronger implications (and potential sales returns) for its winners and advertising participants. And just as the race toward the Oscars and Emmys has become a point of fascination for readers, it made sense for a similar beat to form around the various game awards. Over the past few months, we’ve seen readers enjoy participating in in the GOTY Watch analysis, sharing their own theories in the comments and on social media in response to our own.

Earlier this month, Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach’s newsletter Dead Game published an interview with Oli Welsh about GOTY Watch that gives readers an even closer look at his process for thinking about the “award season,” the contenders, and the meta around The Game Awards in particular. Oli lays out the patterns he’s observed about what types of games tend to win Game of the Year, which he’s put together after analyzing years of winners.

“I would say that it needs to have strong narrative elements, so it should be quite story forward, ideally,” Oli told Dead Game. “Performance should be quite a big part of it. So you want to have it be fully voiced, maybe even motion capture performance, high production values… like AAA narrative-led action adventures or RPGs.

“I’ve analyzed the nominees between the genre categories and Game of the Year, and you nearly always have an overlap of four out of the six Game of the Year nominees are in the action adventure category. The overlap with RPG is smaller, but they are, if anything, more likely to win if nominated.”

That data analysis has fueled our regularly updated predictions post for The Game Awards’ 2024 winners — but none of us know for sure what’s going to win, and that’s all part of the fun.

As Oli put it to Dead Game: “I’d say it’s all part of elevating the medium and part of elevating the medium is saying, ‘This is nonsense, I just want to talk about Arco,’ and part of elevating the medium is saying, ‘Why does, I don’t know, why is Dragon Age far more likely to get nominated for a Game of the Year award than Arco?’ What are the systems that support that?’ We can clarify that for people and maybe it will will change some thinking.”

Read the full interview and more of Gach’s commentary on the TGAs at Dead Game.