Many in the gaming industry consider The Game Awards to be the epitome of excellence. It’s a game developer’s Academy Awards, so to speak; everyone wants to be nominated and win various awards.
2024’s iteration of The Game Awards concluded on December 12th, featuring live performances from Snoop Dogg and a host of games scooping up the various awards. It was the 10th anniversary of this award’s ceremony, which marked a very special occasion for everyone involved. It was also one of the most intriguing nights in recent history – and here are some key things we learned from this year’s awards:
Card Games Are Back
The biggest takeaway from The Game Awards 2024 was that card games are making a huge comeback. Balataro was a gigantic hit this year and scooped up multiple awards – including Best Mobile Game and Best Independent Game. It was also nominated for the coveted Game of The Year Award, which is massive for a card-based game.
And those are just the highlights; it was nominated for countless other awards and many people saw it as the general big surprise of the year. It signals something special for card games, and they’re rapidly growing in popularity, thanks to the release of other big titles like Pokemon TGC Pocket.
You can feel this impact around the general gaming universe as more and more people are turning to card games. Classic online games like Spades and Solitaire are seeing huge jumps in player counts, while more complex games like Marvel Snap are starting to generate ginormous audiences. Expect to see even more card-based fun in 2025 and beyond!
Single-Player Games Are More Popular
2024 was clearly the year of the single-player game. Every game that was nominated for the Game of The Year Award was a single-player title – or a couch co-op game, in the case of Astro Bot.
What’s more, take a look at the nominees for Best Multiplayer Game:
- Black Ops 6
- Helldivers 2
- Super Mario Party Jamboree
- Tekken 8
- Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
We’re hardly looking at the most impressive list of all time. Super Mario Party Jamboree only released a month or so before the awards, yet it still managed to sneak itself in. The fact that Helldivers 2 won this award speaks for itself – we’re not saying the game was “bad”, but it doesn’t exactly have the largest player count.
The simple fact is that many solo-player games were released in 2024 as game developers realised that this is what the wider gaming audience wants to see. People love to play games that don’t require instant sweat mode and can be enjoyed almost like movies or TV shows. The more you think about it, the more you realise it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a new multiplayer game come and take the world by storm. Marvel Rivals is attempting it right now, as is Deadlock, though it remains to be seen whether they’ll still be popular in a few years.
Valorant is probably the best recent example – and that launched a few years ago. You need only look at the failures of games like XDefiant, Concorde and Spectre Divide to see that creating a fantastic multiplayer experience is a lot harder than it used to be.
Huge Franchises Struggle
Following from above, big video game franchises struggled at the 2024 Game Awards. Call of Duty, Fortnite and Final Fantasy each picked up maybe one award this year. Scroll down the list of nominees in each category, and you rarely see a massive name – which is rare for an awards show like this.
Normally, the big names are always nominated, even when their games aren’t that good. Even worse, they regularly pick up awards because of their brands rather than having created great titles. 2024 wasn’t like this at all and could be a wake-up call for many of the biggest gaming franchises out there.
This year proves that smaller companies can come and create incredible games that are far better than some of the larger ones. Franchises are getting too complacent in thinking they can churn out any old game, and their loyal fans will come. That’s not strictly the case anymore, which is very interesting for the future of gaming.
There’s A Lot Of Love For Classic Platformers
Okay, there’s a lot of love for one platformer: Astro Bot. This PS5 exclusive scooped up four awards in total, making it the most successful game of the year:
- Game of The Year
- Best Family Game
- Best Action/Adventure Game
- Best Game Direction
In a world where developers spend years creating Triple-A games with mesmerising graphics and incredible storylines, it’s amazing to see a simple platformer come out on top. There’s nothing remarkable about Astro Bot – it’s a game where you run around completing little puzzles and moving through levels. And yet, that’s what makes it special. The simplicity reminds you of what got you into video games, and that’s helped by the nostalgia of seeing many classic PlayStation characters throughout the game.
Who knows, could Astro Bot’s success signal the start of a new wave of platformers? Maybe Sony will look at this and consider developing newer versions of other games. The new Ratchet & Clank game received rave reviews a few years ago, so perhaps it’s time to bring out some other classics like Crash Bandicoot or Jak and Daxter.
Expansions Might Be The New Sequels
One big thing that stood out from The Game Awards was the Elden Ring expansion seeing a host of nominations. That might not be overly outrageous, but it’s quite interesting to see an expansion gain many nominations, almost like it’s a sequel to the original game.
Granted, Shadow of the Erdtree is a humungous expansion that introduces a whole new storyline and dozens of hours of playtime – and that’s kind of the point here. It’s symbolic of a new approach from video game developers where making sequels isn’t the priority. Instead, companies create vast expansions that add to existing games and keep players coming back for more.
After seeing how successful Elden Ring was a couple of years after the base game came out, could this encourage more companies to do the same? It’s not a “new” thing – The Witched 3 had a couple of huge expansions, and GTA 5 has been expanding for years. But maybe this will signal the end of terrible expansions that provide a couple of hours of new content. Maybe developers will hold off on creating entirely new games and put more effort into expansions instead.
We Need Better Sports Games
EA Sports FC 25 won the Best Sports/Racing Game at this year’s awards. That’s despite it being barely different to the year before, and the year before that, etc. Other nominees included F1 24, NBA 2K25, Top Spin 2K25 and WWE 2K24.
There are already a couple of bad themes here!
For one, over half of the games are from 2K – and the other two are by EA Sports. We desperately need some fresh blood in the sports game world, and we need better sports titles. EA have churned out the same football game for decades and still manage to scoop awards. How is there no competition for the world’s largest sport?!
People adore sports and want to be as involved with them as possible. Games are the only way to do that, outside of playing the sport itself. This year was a real low point for sports gaming fans and we can only hope it gets better.
VR Has A Long Way To Go
The Best VR/AR Game is a category almost nobody cares about. Be perfectly honest, how many of these games do you recognise:
- Batman: Arkham Shadow
- Arizona Sunshine Remake
- Asgard’s Wrath 2
- Metal: Hellsinger VR
- Metro Awakening
I consider myself a fairly big fan of Batman and its game franchises, yet I had no idea this VR game existed. None of these games stands out and makes you want to try them, which sums up the VR gaming industry at this moment. It’s been well over a decade since the idea of VR games came around, and we still feel like we’re in a similar place. Is it a technology thing, or are people waking up to the fact that VR gaming kind of sucks.
When you game, you want to relax and sit in comfort as you jump into a world. VR forces you out of this and makes you stand up and be more aware of everything around you. As strange as it seems, it’s more immersive not to put a VR headset on. The lack of quality titles in this year’s TGA shows that VR gaming is stalling like never before.
And on that note, you’ve come to the end of our list of seven things we learned from The Game Awards 2024. Some of these things are good; others are bad. Regardless, TGA usually sets us up for what’s to come in the next twelve months, so expect to see these trends in gaming throughout 2025.