Last time, we wrote about how Japan’s flagship video gaming magazine, Famitsu, got into a conflict of interest with Kojima Production‘s new game, Death Stranding. Now it could happen in the West, too…

The Game Awards’ nominees have been revealed, and Death Stranding is on the list in no less than eight categories, which is a record in the history of The Game Awards. While it doesn’t seem too shady in itself, let’s quickly add that The Game Awards is hosted by Geoff Keighley, who not only happens to be a good friend of Kojima, but he is also in Death Stranding, too…

No wonder people started asking him about this situation on Twitter. „What Geoff Keighley has done in one fell swoop is make the actual Gaming Awards completely irrelevant. I’ve championed his effort to legitimize gaming by celebrating it with this event & he has now lost the trust of the gaming community by using his power to favour one developer,” one person wrote. Keighley responded by saying „I don’t vote on the nominees! There is a jury of 80 media that select the nominees!”

An international jury of eighty members of the press is mentioned, and while the community’s word matters, in the end, only ten per cent of the final count is in the decision whether a game gets an award or not. So the international jury’s voice matters far more than the people’s.

We don’t know how much Keighley is involved, but it does feel like a conflict of interest to us – if Death Stranding ends up taking the Game of the Year award, it will upset the Internet. (It will happen if Kojima’s game takes more than one award-winning one category doesn’t look suspicious.)

The Game Awards 2019 is set to take place on Thursday, December 12 at 8:30 pm EST/5:30 pm PST.

Source: DualShockers

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