Geoff Keighley’s event was less about developers and more about celebrities…

The show has come under a lot of criticism because the winners had little time to speak on stage and the nominated games had little to celebrate, while the stars had plenty of time to speak and when the developer got to the microphone they had to finish their speech quickly after about half a minute (and this was shown on the teleprompter).

Many developers on Twitter were critical. According to Josh Sawyer (Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, Pentiment), “This year’s The Game Awards is an embarrassing indictment of a segment of the industry desperate for star power validation with little respect for the developers they’re supposedly honoring.” According to Rami Ismail (Luftrausers, Nuclear Throne), it’s hard to reconcile the fact that Sam Lake is sent off stage after 30 seconds, or that the publisher represents the developers of Cocoon… while Kojima shows up for several minutes with nothing to show for it. (Jordan Peele and Kojima chatted about OD for six and a half minutes, while Lake got the hint on the teleprompter to stop after half a minute!)

Cat Manning, Director of Narrative at Firaxis, sarcastically said she loved the long, unfunny elements more than the game developers talking about their work. Jessica Harvey (Arbitrary Metric) said it’s great that the winners are treated like they’re in the way of paid advertising at the awards. Javiera Cordero would be furious if she was pushed off the stage as a winner, and Antonio Freyre asked what he was doing with his time on earth because he was applauding a lot of commercials with lots of suit-clad executives parading around next to celebrities who read the teleprompter like robots…

Keighley responded on Twitter: “By the way – I agree that the music was played too fast for the winners this year, and I asked our team to relax that rule as the show went on. While no one was actually cut off, it’s something we’ll need to address in the future.”

Source: PCGamer