— #NEWS #Discussion —

• GGA: Going Forward •

Following the current direction of the video games industry, I have a few things that I wish to discuss regarding the Gàlaron's Game Awards (GGA).



— The road so far
The GGAs were born for two reason:
- Unsatisfaction towards official Game Awards ceremonies, such as TGA. My wish was therefore that of showcasing more lesser known games and more that made sense for their category.
- A desire to use it as an occasion for me to delve more into the field and share my discoveries and analysis.

When I started the GGAs in 2023, I wanted to consider all video games regardless of their genre, even those that I don't play — thus requiring to do a lot of research online and to ask friends to play some games in my stead. Even so, since the beginning I had to leave out certain categories, specifically: AR/VR games, Mobile-first games, and Visual Novels. The first one is due to me not possessing a VR headset (not being interested in getting one, also because I suffer from motion sickness), and to VR games being both not a prominent category and being sufficiently detached from everything else. As for the other two, it was due to the sheer amount of content released, with a lot of them being of dubious quality — therefore, keeping track and looking into all mobile-first games and VNs would be a whole work of its own.

As time passed, I had issues with PS5-exclusive titles, as I did not posses one of my own and I didn't want to get one only for those few titles every year. So, I either borrowed the console from a friend of mine, or I simply looked online as much as possible to gather information about those games.

Even so, I did not want to make PS5-exlusives ineligible. And the same goes for games which content goes against my ideals — e.g. questionable thematic or bad contexts (such as issues in the company that made them). That is because I believe that the good parts of a title — such as OSTs, for example — could still be worth of recognition. And at the same time, it was also the reason for the "Circus Award": highlighting those games even though they might appear elsewhere in the GGAs.



— Sony and console-exclusives
This year, Sony announced that their console-exclusive games would no longer be released on PC or other consoles in the future: if a game is an exclusive, it will always remain an exclusive. Then, it announced that in 2028 they would drop support of physical games (justifying it with fallacious data).
Those two things are bad on their own, but the situation is even worse when we consider also the following elements:
- Sony will remove all your account's digital possession if the account is not accessed for more than 3 years;
- Sony has removed digital content from their platforms in the past, thus lacking the users' trust that the video games they will buy will actually remain always available;
- Their next console will surely completely lack a disc-reader, therefore having no possibility whatsoever for retro-compatibility (which has always been lacking if not fully absent in previous PlayStation consoles).

All of this makes it so that PlayStation exclusive games from now on will have absolutely no way to be conserved or ""possessed"": it will be possible to buy them only through Sony itself and Sony will have the full power on whether to allow someone to play it or not in the present and in the future. And those games will all be lost if you won't keep accessing the Sony ecosystem every few years — so, forget going away from PlayStation games and return 10 years from now to play something you loved, as often happens with people going back to titles they played as children.

This is obviously extremely anti-users, and it gets even worse when you consider that all of this will also completely kill the second-hand market: games will cost a lot and you will only be able to buy them at that price. And you won't be able to re-sell them, nor to lending them to friends, even though a lot of people got into a game and/or franchise thanks to first buying it at a lower price or by borrowing it from someone.

Therefore, also considering that all I do in the video games field I do in my free time and I don't get paid for it, I have no intention of supporting Sony's path. So, I've been pondering the possibility to remove PlayStation-exclusive titles from the GGAs, even though I would like to make as many titles as possible eligible.
But such a choice would bring to another question: what about Nintendo? All of Nintendo's first-party titles have always been console-exclusive. They do support physical medias, but are infamously known for their issues with giving no options to play many older games and constantly fight against emulating them. So, if I were to make PlayStation-exclusive games ineligible for the GGA, should I do the same for all other console-exclusive (aka Nintendo) titles as well for consistency?



— Gen-AI
Video games that have had Gen-AI be used during their development, would so far fall into my category of "Circus Awards while still eligible for specific categories" — for instance, Shift Up (creator of Stellar Blade) is openly using Gen-AI in game development and therefore also for their next Stellar Blade title, but even so the OSTs will be incredible if they will be similar to those of the previous game. That would mean that if I were to make ineligible games which have been made using Gen-AI, the OSTs of Stellar Blade: Blood Rain would not appear in the OSTs Award even though they are not made with AI (implying that they would actually not be), and I can't say that I completely agree with it.

Also, making ineligible the titles which have had Gen-AI used in their development brings the question: where to draw the line? Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had some Gen-AI placeholder assets due to outsourcing, and the main company itself was not (probably, at least) fully aware of the Gen-AI usage. But most importantly, a lot of studios in the future will use Gen-AI without disclaiming it. Or, they would use it for "minor" speed up processes which are unrelated to the artistic part of development, such as writing prediction and other Gen-AI assisting tools in coding.

So, even though I'm against the usage of Gen-AI for creative purposes, I am still uncertain about how to handle Gen-AI presence in game development as far as the GGAs are concerned.



— Feedback
All of this said, I'm interesting in knowing what you all think about all of this and what are your ideas and advices on how I should handle those two topics (Sony/console-exclusives and Gen-AI) for the GGA.