The Hidden Mechanics of Game Awards

In this episode of the Fighting Game Banter Podcast, We discusses the complexities of game awards, especially those that focus on fighting games. We go into the voting mechanics behind major awards, the historical context of fighting game recognition, and the ongoing challenges in classifying what constitutes a fighting game. But it all boils down to the importance of community engagement and encouraging the FGC to create their own award shows to celebrate the fighting game genre.

We contacted The Game Awards, The NAVGRT Awards, and DashFight. With DashFight the only ones that responded back at the time of this episode's release.

Belinda Ercan Why your vote Doesn't Count

NAVGTR 2022  Award Results

BAFTA 2025 Results

EVO Awards nomination page

Example of the term One-on-One Beat 'em ups

D.I.C.E Award for Fighting Game of the Year: Requirements and History

DashFight

For Guest Inquires, Q&A questions for future episodes, and concerns about errors I may have made with the information said in the podcast. Feel free to email me fighthinggamebanterpodcast@gmail.com Don't forget to leave a like or review if you enjoyed

Thanks again for listening and I hope I made your day a little better.

Chapters

• 0:00 Violent Fighting Awards to come again.
• 1:10 My vote doesn't count?
• 2:36 Variety is a Magazine, not the demographics. But they do get to vote on the games.
• 3:38 Your TGA 2025 Fighting Game Nominees...with one game released in 2025.
• 5:20 Do you meet the criteria for this award? What is the criteria?
• 7:13 Beat Em' Up Guy!
• 9:19 Grab the Awards by the Balls!
• 9:45 Honorable Mentions

Transcript

0:00

Good day to everyone, this is JonisBrasko with another episode of the Fighting Game Banter Podcast. It's December, which means it's time for the Game Awards again. There's been some controversy once more in the fighting game category, or specifically, best fighting. 2XKO is nominated for best fighting, even though the game is not a fully released game. Instead, it's in early access. Compared to what happened in 2022 with Multiversus being released and, well, not even being released, but being nominated and won as a beta, there's concerns that the same thing may happen again once 2XKO gets an official release. With the nominees that are there now, the only actual nominee that is a current fighting game that was released in 2025 was Fatal Fury or Garou City of the Wolves. So with that being said, instead of worrying about how the nomination process happened here, I was curious with what other video game awards, okay, what are they doing? Maybe they have a different criteria on what they use for a fighting game. So that's what I decided to investigate. But before we do that, we should go back to the Game Awards of 2022. During that time, the nominees were DNF Duel, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure All-Star Battle R, The King of Fighters 15, Sifu, and Multiversus Now, like I said earlier, Multiversus was not a released game. Instead, it was a beta. and that would end up winning the award back in 2022. So why that would happen, even though the fans voted for? The fans didn't exactly vote for the best fighting game. In fact, the Game Awards has made it clear that the fan vote is only 10 % of the actual vote. The remaining 90 % comes from a voting jury from influencers and media outlets. For something like best fighting game, It's not being voted by the fans. Instead, it's being voted by non-gaming outlets such as Esquire Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and Variety. And that's in the US. If you're talking the UK, then you have The Daily Mirror, The Times, and Metro. That's deciding the winner of best fighting or best fighting game and not necessarily the fans. The awards that we're mainly going to be talking about are primarily in the United States and in the UK. And as we know about the diversity of the fighting game community, those two places don't necessarily represent that. The Game Awards, the BAFTAs, the DICE Awards, the NAVGTR Awards, and the Golden Joystick Awards, not a single winner has been from SNK or French Bread. So those awards that I was saying that only 10 % are done by the fans, the reason being is they do not want to risk fans selecting the winner based off of social engineering, which could be either by bots or as the fighting game streamer of the year, LilyPichu said in her acceptance speech, I know a lot of you did out of spite. And just for the record, none of these votes are released to the public. So you will vote for an award. It will say that you voted, but that will be the only indicator you will see. There will not release a tally of who voted for which individual game, how many votes there were. And this goes even to the people's Choice category as well. The only thing that will tell the public is who won. And that's it. So, since this is gonna start off talking about the Game Awards, let's talk about the nominees. You have first, of course, 2XKO, then Capcom Fighting Collection 2, the Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection, Virtual Fighter V Revo World Stage, and City of the Wolves. As stated, the only game that's on there that was released this year is City of the Wolves. Everything else is either compilations or, as you heard, early access. Another game that could have been in there would have been Hunter x Hunter But the criteria for the best fighting category, as listed on their site, is simply put, for the best game design primarily around head-to-head combat. but not necessarily, hence Sifu's nomination in 2022. Now, if we look at the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, which will just from here on out just refer to us the DICE Awards, they stated as, the award recognizes titles that offer the use of the virtual experience of controlling a character engaging in individual combat with another character, usually from a fixed camera perspective. The opponent can either be controlled by another player or by the game. Now that doesn't sound unreasonable except when you hear one other thing, it is one of two categories, the other being online game of the year, that is not limited to the release within the calendar year, but must be supported by significant new content. So this is how a game like Multiversus can win an award. Even if the game hasn't technically been released, because it was still offering new content, which people paid for, it made itself eligible. The same thing with 2XKO. not to completely separate those two examples traditional fighting games have been able to take advantage of this as well. With Street Fighter IV and Mortal Kombat 11 being able to take back-to-back awards because of their significant new content. So you had Street Fighter... IV Vanilla and then Super Street Fighter win, and you had MK11 Vanilla and then MK11 ultimate win. Now, the other award I wanted to mention is The Golden Joystick Awards. They're significant because they were the first video game award show to actually give a Game of the Year award to a fighting game with The Way of the Exploding Fist back in 1985. They haven't had a best fighting game category since 2012 with Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition. However, they do have the best early release game category in which 2XKO was not eligible for at the time of nomination. So there is an actual award in place for early release games that can be applied without making a special exception. Now, another award ceremony that doesn't necessarily have a fighting game category, but will put fighting games in other genres, is the BAFTA Awards. In the BAFTA Awards, they gave Tekken 8 a nomination in the best multiplayer game category. But it lost to Helldivers 2, The NAVGTR Awards has two different fighting game categories. They have outstanding fighting game franchise, new fighting game. For the 2022 edition, the nominees were Capcom Fighting Collection, KOF XV, River City Girls, WWE 2K22, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Shredder's Revenge. Teenage Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge Game is the one that takes it. And that may seem kind of confusing that a beat-em-up took the Best Fighting Game award. But I've learned The word fighting game and the word beat-em-up weren't always two distinct terms. And especially in the UK, fighting games were basically known as one-on-one beat'em-ups. versus your traditional side scrolling beat-em-ups. With that being said, that does get put into the category of fighting games in this case, and hence that's why it won. Now there are also award shows that have put wrestling, boxing, and certain combat sports games into the simulation category. But when you don't have that category, and again, it's primarily based off of one-on-one combat, then that's how games like WWE, UFC, Undisputed get put into these categories. Now I mentioned they had a second category, is original fighting game. And Sifu did win that one over Boomerang Foo, Dawn of the Monsters, DNF Duel, and Rumbleverse. And as far as the one-on-one beat-em-up term used for fighting games, I was able to find that term used as recent as 2015. So with everything that I've said, what else is there to really be mentioned? Except that these award shows don't know how to classify a fighting game. and they're looking at the FGC and realizing that we struggle to classify fighting games as well. We spent literally 30 years debating on what's a fighting game, what's not a fighting game? Is a platformer a fighting game? Is an arena fighter a fighting game? Is a boxing game a fighting game? And even with the latest thing about classifying, what is a fighting game streamer? that in itself shows the levels of divide that's already there in the community. And LilyPichu won, she basically turned to the audience and said, for those who are calling me a FGC Tourist, you can suck her balls. We were all at one time fighting game noobs. You don't have to say tourists or whatever. We were all new to the genre. There's no one out there on the streets talking about, I started with Shanghai Kid and Way of the Exploding Fist. There's no one who's out there saying it. So what should you do then? Simply put. Do your own award show. You have locals, there's people who have, you clearly know in your community that, hey, this is the best player, this is the best game, these were the hype moments, these are the best commentators, this is the best music, you can do that. If you want to actually support fighting game award content, you could always vote at the EVO Awards. I'd to close out the podcast with a statement I received from the Editor-and-Chief of DashFight. He said, here at DashFight, we host several iterations of the DashFight Awards, an award show made for the community that needed an outlet to talk about all the cool things that happen in this space during the year. Our two biggest categories were... player of the year, and of course, fighting game of the year. What we tried to do with this category is to highlight what the community was enjoying the most. That's why we made out best to highlight even smaller games that were unknown to the mainstream gaming community like Idol Showdown. We never allowed for returning nominations based on the amount of new content introduced. but we had the best ongoing fighting game category that showcased the support the games were receiving. We do believe the Game Awards has come a long way since its infamous Sifu nomination, but at the same time, they could always do better. Nominating Hunter x Hunter Nen Impact would have been a good start. But if we were to talk about 2XKO, we really don't think It's that big of a deal. Yes, the game is in a very bare-bone state, but it, and I'm putting the lovely Star Marks,*was* released and it *is*, again, Star Marks, playable. And there's even several quite exciting components for it already. And the players are clearly having a blast with it. 2XKO clearly meets the eligibility criteria, but the state... it was released, it would be all but guaranteed that it wouldn't win. The Game Awards is a show that caters to the mainstream casual gamer, and the nominations usually reflect that. We in the FGC are not blessed with many highest profile releases every year, so having a game that technically meets the requirements *and*, again, stars, has people talking is already a win. Kind Regards, Editor-in-Chief, dashfight.com. but definitely support groups like DashFight, support the EVO Awards, they're taking nominations as of the time the game awards of December 11th. You can always support your community without necessarily expecting a mainstream outlet to support it for you. They're going to do what's in the best interest of them. They're going to promote what's going to make them likes, what's going to get them views. They're not going to necessarily promote the stuff that you love. So it's your job to do it yourselves. You can always stream content. You can always create content online. You can cosplay. You can share with your friends or family. Go to locals. All of these things are supporting the game without expecting it to receive an award or acceptance from the mainstream. If you want to vote or feel like you were supporting your game, do it. Please go ahead and do it. I'm not gonna lie. I did vote. I voted for City of the Wolves. I have no problem saying that. I voted even though I know that my vote was only going to be 10 % and I will never know how many people voted with me on that nomination. I still did it anyway. I'm an American, I'm used to my vote not amounting to much where I'm at. This is a quick episode of the Fighting Game Banter Podcast because this is something that the community has bantered and talked about year after year after year. They're not going to love, respect, or give fighting games, as much credit as you do. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Fighting Game Banter Podcast. All references, articles and videos that I used for this podcast will be linked at the bottom of the description. If there are any questions, anything that I got wrong or need to correct, feel free to email me at fightinggamebanterpodcast @ gmail.com. I thank everyone for listening and as always, I look forward to the next tale of banter.