Did Arc Raiders Deserve A GOTY Nomination At The Game Awards? It s Complicated For Multiplayer Games
Stacey Henley is the Newcastle born-and-based Editor-in-Chief at TheGamer, and an award winning features writer with experience across written and video content. She won the GGW Award for her feature on the parasocial marketing of Cyberpunk 2077, and has been twice nominated for the GameHers award for Journalism. She specialises in analysis of triple-A trends, cinema, and Taylor Swift.
The Game of the Year nominees are in, and Arc Raiders did not make the cut for the big prize. How surprising that is may depend on which gaming sphere you inhabit, but I think it would be fair to say that, regardless of anyone’s hopes for it making the shortlist, most people felt it was a long shot. The big question is how much did it deserve it?
Game of the Year is a subjective award, and thus the answer to this question is subjective. It sometimes feels like these sorts of conversations can be subjective to a fault – the reason it deserves it is ‘I like it’, the reason it doesn’t deserve it is ‘I don’t like it’. But you could argue the entire system of The Game Awards is faulty in this way, with very little critical curation involved in choices made by the jury, instead going for the biggest games of the year and calling them the best.
The Game Awards Nomination System Works Against Arc Raiders
There is some logic here – if these are games everyone plays and most people like, surely they are the best of the year? But then, maybe critics have a greater responsibility to highlight great games that didn’t get this sort of exposure. The Game Awards is often compared to the Oscars (usually favourably, citing viewing figures in the same tiresome yearly debate), but the fact is that most casual filmgoers can look at the Best Picture nominees and find a great new film to watch. The same can rarely be said of the more populist nomination system of The Game Awards.
The way The Game Awards nominees work, with a glut of websites nominating a chunk of games per category en masse, heavily favours big games through sheer might – it’s harder for curated picks to get a look in against the tidal waves of games everyone plays and every single major press outlet covers. An underrated victim of this system though is the hardcore online game, games many will reject on the basis of their premise alone. Arc Raiders is one such victim this year.
But there’s also the fact that games like Arc Raiders aren’t evaluated in the same way as single player games. While that might not be ‘fair’ in the ‘we give out awards on a yearly basis’ sense, it does seem to be more accurate to measure them in different ways. If a single player game is great at launch, then never gets a single update, that’s completely fine. If a multiplayer game hits the ground running, then never gets a substantial update, it dies and is forgotten. We still don’t know where Arc Raiders will fall.
Multiplayer Games Need To Be Futureproof To Win Game Of The Year
The problem with putting Arc Raiders up for Game of the Year is that you’re trying to predict the future. While early updates have suggested Arc Raiders could have legs, it’s still very early into its overall lifespan. The only true multiplayer to win Game of the Year (if we consider It Takes Two to be spiritually single player) was Overwatch in 2016.
While we may have eventually soured on the Overwatch brand as it grew stale and the sequel failed to inject as much life as was needed into it, it would certainly be fair to say that Overwatch’s legacy lasted longer than a few months in 2016, and it became a transformative game for the multiplayer space.
Time will tell if Arc Raiders can do the same, and with just over two weeks between Arc Raiders launching and the nominees being announced (meaning votes were collected inside that window), time was not on Arc Raiders’ side. Had it launched earlier in the year, it may have had more time to prove itself, but even that would not be the true test of a multiplayer game’s value. The best revenge will be repeatedly scooping Best Ongoing Game in years to come, but that feels a pyrrhic victory given the hopes pinned to it.
By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept Valnet’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime.
Even looking at it in a 2025 bubble though, its 87 OpenCritic score is lower than all six GOTY nominees (Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is lowest at 89), as well as Split Fiction, Blue Prince, and Monster Hunter Wilds. I have my own thoughts on whether this year has truly been ‘a great year for gaming’ in the traditional sense, and those caveats around hardcore shooters being nominated also apply to a lesser extent to critics reviewing them. But by raw data, it doesn’t make the cut. Then again, I have repeatedly made the point that raw data is a poor way to decide these things, so maybe that can be ignored anyway.
The fact is, Arc Raiders is not on the shortlist. It’s only up for Best Multiplayer, which adds to the feeling that it has been a little bit neglected by the awards at large when it’s not in categories like Audio Design or Community Support as well. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is likely to walk away with the big prize, and few will have many complaints about that. If we’re still talking about Arc Raiders in 2030, we’ll know it at least deserved a shot at the title. If not, then none of this really matters.
We want to hear from you! Share your opinions in the thread below and remember to keep it respectful.
Please respect our community guidelines. No links, inappropriate language, or spam.
