Voting is over, everything is tallied, here are the results of our GOTY process:
Step 1: All of our editors pick their top games of last year. You can view the lists below:
Step 2: After we have everyone’s favorite games, we load them into a seeded bracket and begin our community vote to determine the winner. The bracket will be created on January 14th.
Step 3: Voting commences on January 15th
Step 4: Rejoice for on January 20th we will definitively know what was the best game of 2015.
Q. Everyone else did their GOTY two weeks ago, what’s your deal?
A. How can you be sure about the best game of the year when the year isn’t even over yet? Beyond that, we’re all busy people and so we will often use the holidays as a time to catch up on things we might have missed earlier in the year.
Q. Why not just choose game of the year yourselves?
A. Forgetting the fact that none of us can agree on anything, there are a lot of games that we really love that other editors will likely never have had a chance to play. For 2013 we chose The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds as our GOTY even though less than 50% of our staff had actually played the game. It never would have won otherwise, and it totally wound up deserving it.
Q. But doesn’t putting it to an open and unregulated vote basically mean that the award has no meaning or value?
A. Not really seeing the issue there. Even with our process the Enemy Slime GOTY carries the exact same amount of importance and value as anybody else’s, that is to say very very little.
Q. Where is Kentucky Route Zero? Why has no one picked Kentucky Route Zero? FOR GOD’S SAKE WHEN WILL KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO GET AN AWARD?!
A. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but believe it or not Kentucky Route Zero is still not complete almost three years later. Games that are not yet completed are not eligible to win our game of the year. This includes multi-part games that have not reached their end (e.g. Minecraft: Story Mode or King’s Quest) and games that are still in early access (e.g. ARK: Survival Evolved or The Forest).
Q. You forgot to include __________ you fucking idiots!
A. Throw that game in the comments section and we’ll try our best to feel bad about missing it.
