Here we are friends. The dust has settled and another year of GOTY voting has come to a close. Thanks to everybody who participated, congratulations to every game listed in our brackets, just about all of them put up a good fight along the way.
Just getting here? Curious about how this happened? You can still read our picks and explanation of the process below:
2017 Was very kind to us indeed, with each editor easily managing to come up with a list of gems that they were graced with during the previous 365 days. If you’re unfamiliar with how we do GOTY round these parts here’s a quick explanation:
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 23rd.
Step 3: Voting commences on January 23rd
Step 4: Rejoice for once voting concludes we will definitively know what was the best game of 2017.
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. Have you guys heard of this little indie title Kentucky Route Zero? I think it’s pretty great and it should win a GOTY award. Can it have one?
A. Despite its first entry being released over five years ago Kentucky Route Zero is (almost unbelievably) still not complete. Games that are not yet finished are not eligible to win our game of the year. This includes multi-part games that have not reached their end and games that are still in early access (e.g. Rimworld, Astroneer).
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.
