Taking a Look at Our Game Awards Prediction Accuracy - How Many Games Did We Get Right?

The Game Awards recently announced their full list of nominees for the December 7 ceremony. In case you missed it, we had a few articles where we tried to guess the contenders for 20 of these nominees, and we did an... okay-ish job. In this article, we'll go over each category and tell you our accuracy rate, then have a quick discussion at the end of it. Let's get into it!

Table of Contents

• Category
  • Game of the Year
  • Best Game Direction
  • Best Narrative
  • Best Art Direction
  • Best Score and Music
  • Best Audio Design
  • Best Performance
  • Best Independent Game
  • Best Ongoing
  • Best Mobile Game
  • Best VR/AR Game
  • Best Action Game
  • Best Action/Adventure Game
  • Best Role Playing Game
  • Best Fighting Game
  • Best Family Game
  • Best Sim/Strategy Game
  • Best Sports/Racing Game
  • Best Multiplayer Game
  • Most Anticipated Game
• What Have We Learned?

Categories

Here's how it's gonna work: Below you'll find a bunch of tables for the categories we guessed, ordered alphabetically except for GOTY (which is on top) and Most Anticipated (on the bottom). Next to each category we have the accuracy score, telling you how many games we got right.

Spoiler, our average accuracy was 44.1(6)%. Our lowest accuracy was 20, or 1 in 5 games guessed correctly; most numerous was 40, or 2 out of 5 games; and our highest was 60, or 3 out of 5 games. Not the best, but pretty decent for our first time, and we got at least 2 games right for each category except one.

Game of the Year - 50% ACC

Game of the Year was particularly hard to narrow down this edition. Any of the games we guessed could've been nominated, and there's more we haven't mentioned that could've been candidates. Resident Evil 4 is kinda cheating, and we'll talk about Alan Wake II at the end of the article. In the meantime, 3 out of 6 isn't bad.

Best Game Direction - 40% ACC

Best Narrative - 40% ACC

Best Art Direction - 40% ACC

Best Score and Music - 40% ACC

Best Audio Design - 20% ACC

Oof, this one hurts. Like we said in our dedicated article, Audio Design is a tough one to guess, since actually noticing it means it's not good. Hi-Fi Rush was the most obvious contender, the game's all about sound, but we missed the mark on the others.

Best Performance - 33.33333333333% ACC

This one isn't fair! This category has always had 5 nominees, why'd they have to increase the number this year? It wouldn't be a problem if it didn't make the accuracy score so ugly.

Best Independent Game - 40% ACC

Best Ongoing - 60% ACC

Best Mobile Game - 60% ACC

Best VR / AR Game - 40% ACC

Ok, we kiiinda predicted GT7 as part of the F1 23 section. We're not going to count it, as it doesn't affect the final tally that much (1% more), but we just wanted to say we called it. We also guessed RE4 VR, which isn't out yet, but REVIII VR won in its place.

Best Action Game - 40% ACC

Best Action / Adventure Game - 40% ACC

Best Role Playing Game - 40% ACC

Best Fighting Game - 60% ACC

We screwed up here! TMNT was released in 2022, not 2023. That was for the mobile versions, which is what threw us off. Not that it matters, we probably wouldn't have picked the other two options, as fighting games was the one category whose indie scene we weren't really familiar with.

Best Family Game - 40% ACC

Best Sim / Strategy Game - 40% ACC

Best Sports / Racing Game - 60% ACC

Best Multiplayer Game - 40% ACC

Most Anticipated Game - 60% ACC

What Have We Learned?

So, what have we learned from this experience? Well, for one, you should always try to match the number of predictions with the nominees (or go higher, but that's cheating). The fact that most categories had 5 nominees and we only had 4 predictions put us at a disadvantage.

Second, there's Alan Wake II. We completely ignored the game because it came out very close to the awards, as well as a week after a number of very high-profile games (Spider-Man 2, Mario Wonder). This didn't give us time to look into it, or for it to leave its mark on the games industry as a whole.

On the other end of the spectrum is Stray Gods: The Rollplaying Musical, which we really put all our eggs in only for it to not even show up. This goes for a good chunk of indie games, which didn't really make a splash as a whole. Not because they're bad games, quite the opposite, but TGA is ultimately a popularity contest, and AAA will always be more popular than the indie scene, for better or worse.

Speaking of popular AAA games that didn't show up, the complete lack of Hogwarts Legacy is quite surprising. It's the latest entry in a very big franchise and it sold really well, yet it's nowhere to be seen. Guess the other games were all just better than it, even Starfield.

Lastly, this has been an interesting, if quite draining, experiment that we put together here. Depending on the response from our community, we might do this again next year.

If you want to read our prediction article, you can do so here:

• Best Game Direction, Best Art Direction, Best Indie, Best Fighting, Best Mobile Game
• Best Narrative, Best Score & Music, Best Ongoing, Best Action Game, Best Family
• Best Audio Design, Best Performance, Best Action / Adventure, Best Sim / Strategy, Best VR / AR
• Game of the Year, Best Role Playing, Best Multiplayer, Best Sports / Racing, Most Anticipated Game

What did you think of our series of articles of the TGA? What improvements would you like to see to the format in future instalments? Let us know in the comments below!