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The story
A thread on 5ch’s hardware/industry (“Geha”) board lit up over the fact that this year’s Game of the Year (GOTY) contenders still haven’t taken shape. Titles like Pragmata, Mortal Shell 2, and Forza Horizon 6 came up, but were met with a wave of pushback — “it doesn’t stay in the conversation,” “it’s not broadly appealing enough.”
Debate also broke out over how Nintendo’s new titles and GTA6 should factor in, and over the fairness of past award wins, including Breath of the Wild and Astro Bot.
What people said
Seriously, there's nothing else in the running either.
Oh yeah, that exists.
But nobody's talking about it at all anymore.
A game that only pops off at launch like that is too weak a pick.
There's just no game this year that's still generating buzz on an ongoing basis.
Nah, not even close.
And the first one was a crap game you could finish in a few hours anyway.
【2026 Predictions for the 4 Major GOTY Awards】
Golden Joystick Awards
Resident Evil Requiem
The Game Awards
Big Walk
D.I.C.E. Awards
Grand Theft Auto VI
Game Developers Choice Awards
Big Walk
Throw in the BAFTA Games Awards too.
Nioh 3 is genuinely fun, but compared to From Software's games its systems are overcomplicated — it's far from broadly appealing.
Back when Resident Evil Village came out, it actually beat titles like Forza Horizon 5 and Cyberpunk 2077 to win the 'Steam Awards 2021 – GOTY.' It's also picked up the top Golden Joystick Award multiple times.
https://store.steampowered.com/steamawards/2021?l=japanese
Only Microsoft fanboys think that way — Forza's reviews on Steam are always mediocre anyway.
・It has to be out on PS5
・It can't be published by Microsoft
You'd know in seconds if you actually looked it up — are you confusing it with Forza Motorsport?
FH4: 90% Very Positive out of 303,185 reviews
FH5: 89% Very Positive out of 258,123 reviews
FH6: 83% Very Positive out of 83,760 reviews
Sorry, but the top-tier game battle line starts above 90%, honestly more like 95%.
Sure, there are genuinely divisive games that keep a devoted following even after shedding casual users.
But that's the 80%-ish zone — and Forza's stuck there, working hard just to hold that spot.
A rip-off game doesn't have that right.
Nintendo games are made by studying existing games and polishing them to a high level of completion, rather than through strong authorial vision, artistic identity, or a message.
That means even when they sell well, they rarely get picked for GOTY.
Given the history of the awards, that's basically common knowledge at this point.
Does Nintendo even need to go all-out just for there to be candidates at all?
Isn't there anything besides GTA?
Palworld and The Duskbloods.
Though Palworld's probably out of the running since Nintendo's been picking legal fights with it.
I voted for Pragmata, a new release, aiming for the 'Annual Work Category – Excellence Award.'
You might ask, 'Excellence Award? Not the Grand Award?' — but if you're aiming for the 'Annual Work Category – Grand Award,' the sensible call is to put your one vote toward either Mario Kart World, Poko-Poke (a nickname for Pokémon), or, as a long shot, Donkey Kong Bananza.
I told you Forza's actually 'Very Positive' on Steam since you said it's always mediocre there, and your reply just floored me lol.
So in your world, anything below 'Very Positive' is a mediocre game and only 'Overwhelmingly Positive' counts as a top-tier title?
That's pretty extreme.
Ah, so you've never actually played it on Steam.
Oh, one of those 'Very Positive on Steam just means an average game' guys.
Yeah, you see those around.
95–100%: Overwhelmingly Positive
80–94%: Very Positive
70–79%: Mostly Positive
40–69%: Mixed
20–39%: Mostly Negative
0–19%: Overwhelmingly Negative
The 'Very Positive' band is set pretty wide, you know.
It's a gentle label chosen so it doesn't tank sales.
And people like you actually believe it lol
Love the confidence to call 20% 'Mostly Negative' with a straight face.
If 8 out of 10 buyers recommend it, that's plenty good, isn't it?
Big-budget titles cost more and get way more reviews than indies, so they naturally get judged more harshly too.
Nintendo's not putting up the money — if they've got cash to spare buying GOTY, running more Nintendo Directs would be way more effective.
Then how did Breath of the Wild win? Tears of the Kingdom also picked up category awards.
Sony probably just couldn't afford to buy that award.
Then why didn't the Chinese game Black Myth win it?
Maybe there was a publisher working hard behind the scenes to get Astro Bot the top prize?
Since you're clearly no expert — what do you think should've won instead of Astro Bot?
Seems fair given its high Metacritic score.
I've got no complaints about Astro Bot winning the top award.
Paying to buy the top prize is just standard corporate behavior anyway — same as with Famitsu.
I never assumed the top award was decided purely on the game's quality to begin with.
If you're going to say that much, do you have a source that it was bought with money?
Or is this just a conspiracy theory some amateur like you is bitterly fantasizing about?
If you've got nothing, that's what it looks like.
Even if that kind of thing happens with the top award, I think getting nominated at all is still a fair, legitimate evaluation.
A big-budget title that can't even manage that is straight-up trash.
Background and Key Points
The Game Awards, Golden Joystick, D.I.C.E., BAFTA, and GDC’s Game Developers Choice Awards are the major Western GOTY circuit, all clustered around November–March, with Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards the closest thing to industry consensus. Separately, Japan runs its own Japan Game Awards through CESA at Tokyo Game Show, which is partly public-vote based (hence a poster casually “voting” for Pragmata or Ghost of Yōtei) and has different categories, including an “Excellence Award” tier below the top “Grand Award” — a structure with no real Western equivalent. Nintendo’s track record is the recurring subtext: Breath of the Wild (2017) and Tears of the Kingdom both won prizes despite Nintendo rarely campaigning for GOTY the way Sony or Microsoft do, which posters use to argue sales and “authorial vision” aren’t what wins these awards.
The thread’s real fault line wasn’t which game deserves GOTY, but what actually counts as a “contender” at all — several posters insisted a game has to stay in ongoing conversation, not just spike at launch, disqualifying Pragmata and Mortal Shell 2 on those grounds alone, while Forza Horizon 6 split people on whether an ~83% Steam approval rating is elite or merely decent.
What’s likely to trip up outside readers is Steam’s review-percentage system itself: “Very Positive” covers a wide 80–94% band, not a middling score, which one poster misused to dismiss Forza as “average.” Also worth noting: the thread never mentions that GTA6’s late-2026 release timing could put it outside this cycle’s eligibility window entirely, which undercuts several posters’ assumption that it’s a default frontrunner.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “This year’s GOTY contenders still haven’t settled on anything — seriously, what do you think will win? This year, Poko.”
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