Yesterday, thelist of nominees for this year’s edition of The Game Awardscame out and, perhaps unsurprisingly,ÂDeath Strandingended up being one of the year’s most-nominated titles. In total,ÂDeath Strandingwas nominated for eight different categories including the highly-coveted Game of the Year award, which is essentially the highest achievement that The Game Awards hands out each year. While this normally wouldn’t cause any concerns whatsoever, some have taken issue with the fact that the host and showrunner of The Game Awards, Geoff Keighley, is directly involved inÂDeath Stranding.On social media and various other platforms, some have started to express thatKeighley’s involvement withÂDeath Strandingin the cameo role of “The Ludens Fan"is a conflict given the fact that he also organizes The Game Awards. Many have started questioning Keighley specifically on Twitter, asking him how he thinks this process can be fair whatsoever given the circumstances. Keighley, in turn, has responded to some of these concerns, making clear that he has no role whatsoever in voting for the eventual winners at the show.
If you’re unaware of the voting process at The Game Awards, the nominees and eventual winners are selected by a panel comprised of 80 media outlets from around the globe. The general public can then also contribute and vote for each category as well, but their collective votes only make up 10% of the final count. No outside influences, such as Keighley, have any role in the voting, otherwise. You canread more about this on The Game Awards websiteif you’re interested.
Personally speaking, I do think that this whole situation is somewhat of a conflict of interest on Keighley’s behalf, but I also don’t think it’s one that should makeDeath Strandingunable to be nominated for any awards. As long as Keighley isn’t involved with voting, which he explicitly isn’t, then there’s not a problem to be had.
If anything, this whole situation is just a bit strange from an optics standpoint more than anything else. If The Game Awards 2019 ends with Keighley handing over the award for Game of the Year to Hideo Kojima, a man he has forÂyearsproclaimed to be a very close friend of his, then it’d just look very weird. Still, there’s no denying thatÂDeath Strandingis likely very deserving of many of the nominations that it has and as such is a worthy contender
Regardless of how some may feel about this whole situation, it’s not going to change the fact thatÂDeath Strandingis nominated for many of these awards and will, in all likelihood, take home some hardware. We’ll have to wait and just see how successful it may or may not be though in a few weeks.
The Game Awards 2019 is set to take place on Thursday, December 12 at 8:30pm EST/5:30pm PST.
