The Game Awards had plenty of trailers, one of which was surprisingly a look at the next Street Fightermovie. And its appearance there reignited an old, long-lasting grude match against Mortal Kombat.
See, the second Kombat movie is due out in May, but it didn’t make an appearance at the gaming ceremony. By contrast, the Street Fighter cast was there onstage, where comedian Andrew Schulz, who plays the film’s version of Dan Hibiki, threw shade at the lack of Mortal Kombat. “We’re not the only game that appreciates your patronage,” he said. “There’s another game out there, they also flew from around the world to be here because they appreciate you. So give it up for the whole cast of Mortal Kombat II!”
The audience applaused, hoping to see Karl Urban, Joe Taslim, and whoever else also come on stage, but nah, no dice. Schulz said that cast didn’t show because “they don’t care about you. They only care about money. We care about money AND you. Street Fighter FOREVER!” On the internet, social media lit up at the dig, reminding older fans of decades-old beef between the two franchises that first took hold in the 90s and still persists in some form to this day. There’ve been some years where they’ve both had a game release, like Street Fighter 6 and Mortal Kombat 1 releasing back in 2023. While the former is in its third year of post-launch DLC, Netherrealm ceased development on Kombat 1 earlier in 2025 to focus on its next game.
Not everyone dug Schulz’s gag, though. Mortal Kombat II producer Todd Garner wrote that unlike the Fighter film’s star, he “[doesn’t] climb over others to get ahead,” but later added that he hopes for both movies to be “huge.” (He also indicated marketing for his film will ramp up in the near future, which so far has just been that first trailer, a featurette from New York Comic-Con, and footage from that same panel only for those in attendance.) Will that include some dig at the competition? We’ll have to wait to find out.
Honestly, compiling the biggest losers for Engadget is more fun than talking up the winners. While we reviewed nothing as atrocious as those ill-fated AI assistant gadgets from 2024, AI companies and services straddled both the winner and loser podiums.
The losers might be you, the American consumer. (Sorry.) In the US, anyone wanting a drone will have to find something that isn’t made by DJI. The company has been targeted by regulators since 2017 over concerns its products could spy on sensitive US infrastructure on behalf of China.
Engadget
The problem is DJI has such a high market share (over 75 percent) that its absence will effectively upend the industry. Oh, and its drones are consistently the best too. The US government hasn’t yet attempted to work with DJI to assess whether its products pose a risk. DJI recently made a final plea for a security review, sending letters to five US agencies that could assess its products. If that fails, US drone options will shrink massively.
In the same 12 months, EV sales across the globe are up around 25 percent this year. Germany set a record in the first half of 2025, with electric cars accounting for nearly one in five new registrations. In China, EV sales are growing so fast (over 50 percent market share) that the country is flooding the global market with gas-powered cars it can’t sell at home. However — remember this is about losers — in the US, the Trump administration ended the EV tax credit. And shock! Sales of EVs in the US slumped, with some automakers, such as Ford, seeing a 60 percent year-over-year decline.
As Sam Rutherford puts it, this policy change puts more roadblocks (his inadvertent pun, not mine) in the way of making cheaper battery-powered cars. It also affects EV investment and could mean US automakers fall even further behind their rivals elsewhere.
We also point and shake our heads at Xbox, Grok and TV streaming. Check it all out right here.
— Mat Smith
The other big stories (and deals) this morning
News, trailers and award winners. Most of which are Clair Obscur.
Remedy
If you missed The Game Awards 2025, you missed a historic sweep by Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The Belle Epoque saga, which was expected to win several categories, even bagged Game of the Year and eventually picked up more wins than any title in the show’s 12-year history.
Naturally, there were trailers and game reveals too, which were pleasantly notable. We got a first look at the Control sequel, Resonant, Star Wars: Fate of The Old Republic is coming, headed by Mass Effect veterans, while Larian Studios is returning to the Divinity series following the success of Baldur’s Gate 3. Heck, if you want a good chance of winning at The Game Awards, hire Jennifer English to voice one of your main characters — she was in both BG3 and Clair Obscur.
Disney announced a three-year licensing agreement with OpenAI to bring more than 200 of its characters, including those from Star Wars and Pixar, to the Sora app and ChatGPT. With the deal in place, OpenAI users will be able to prompt ChatGPT to generate images that tap into Disney’s intellectual property, with costumes, props, vehicles and environments covered. Additionally, Disney will invest $1 billion in OpenAI, with the option to purchase additional equity down the road.
Learn about tennis from Serena Williams or music from John Legend.
If you’re struggling to find a good present for the holidays, MasterClass has discounted its subscriptions by up to 40 percent. I secured a similar deal for myself and was pleasantly surprised by the solid interface and the number of courses. I also forgot to update my subscription, whoops. Maybe this offer will get me back on board.
It’s already getting the details wrong on its own shows.
Amazon’s plan to offer AI-generated recaps of Prime Video shows isn’t off to a great start. The company’s recap of the first season of Fallout has multiple errors. First, the AI-generated recap incorrectly identifies the era of the show’s Los Angeles-set flashbacks as being the 1950s — they’re actually 2077. Perhaps more egregiously for a recap, it misunderstands the ending of the first season, which sets up season two’s partnership between vault dweller Lucy and The Ghoul.
This year at The Game Awards, if your game wasn’t melodramatic, mechanically innovative, beautifully presented and aggressively French, it didn’t stand a chance. The Game Awards 2025 wrapped up on the evening of Thursday, December 11 with a record-breaking showing by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from Sandfall Interactive. The game received the most nominations and wins in the show’s 12-year history.
But, we know that’s not really why you’re here. Between the award presentations and musical numbers, there were heaps of new game trailers, announcements and updates, and we’ve collected them all for you right here. The award winners are also there.
News
Award winners
Best family game:Donkey Kong Bananza
Innovation in accessibility:Doom: The Dark Ages
Best esports game:Counter-Strike 2
Best esports athlete: Chovy
Best esports team: Team Vitality
Best mobile game:Umamasume: Pretty Derby
Best indie game:Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Best adaptation:The Last of Us season 2
Best action game:Hades II
Best performance: Jennifer English, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Games for impact:South of Midnight
Best ongoing game:No Man’s Sky
Best audio design:Battlefield 6
Content creator of the year: MoistCr1TiKaL
Best fighting game:Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves
Most anticipated game:Grand Theft Auto VI
Best action/adventure game:Hollow Knight: Silksong
Best art direction:Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Best sim/strategy game:Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles
Best debut indie game:Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Best score and music: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Best sports/racing game: Mario Kart World
Best community support: Baldur’s Gate 3
Best VR/AR game: The Midnight Walk
Best RPG:Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Players’ voice:Wuthering Waves
Best narrative:Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Best multiplayer game:Arc Raiders
Best game direction: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Game of the year: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Trailers
Pragmata by Capcom
Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic by Arcanaut Studios and Lucasfilm Games
Divinity by Larian Studios
Coven of the Chicken Foot by Wildflower Interactive
ONTOS by Frictional Games
4:LOOP by Bad Robot Games
Resident Evil Requiem by Capcom
Order of the Sinking Star by Thekla
Exodus by Archetype Entertainment
WARLOCK by Invoke Studios and Wizards of the Coast
Control Resonant by Remedy Enterainment
Gang of Dragon by Nagoshi Studio
Street Fighter movie sneak peak
LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight by Warner Bros. Games
Tomb Raider: Catalyst by Crystal Dynamics
Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis by Crystal Dynamics and Flying Wild Hog
Invincible VS by Skybound Games
Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred by Blizzard Entertainment
Deadpool is coming to Marvel Rivals
007 First Light – Lenny Kravitz Announcement
Saros by Housemarque
Warframe featuring Werner Herzog for some reason
Total War: Warhammer 40,000 by Creative Assembly
Hitman World of Assassination by IO Interactive
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve by Bandai Namco
Star Wars Galactic Racer by Fuse and Lucasfilm Games
Tonight the 2025 Game Awards took place, and like every year, millions of people tuned in for a glimpse into the next few years of games. The Los Angeles event may have “Awards” in the name, but for most people, it’s an extended E3-style press conference hosted by Geoff Keighley. If you weren’t able to catch the live show and want to know all the World Premieres you missed, we’ve got you covered. Here’s everything we saw at the 2025 ceremony.
Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic
After some awards and a Clair Obscur musical performance, we got the first trailer for Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic by Arcanaut Studios. The game is a single-player action RPG, and ex-BioWare director Casey Hudson, who is known for his work on the original KOTOR and the Mass Effect trilogy, is returning to Star Wars for the project.
Divinity
After lifting a bunch of people off the ground, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian revealed what the mysterious statue Keighley had been teasing all week was for: a new entry in the Divinity series. All we saw was a pretty brutal cinematic trailer of a man being burned alive in front of a crowd of cheering cultists, but that didn’t go very well for them. See for yourself by watching the full trailer. Damn. Pretty gnarly for this early in the show, huh? The game will apparently be even bigger than Baldur’s Gate 3, and that’s pretty daunting.
4:LOOP
After a lovely speech from Best Performance winner Jennifer English, we saw a new shooter/roguelike from Sony and Bad Robot called 4:LOOP.
Coven of the Chicken Foot
Next up is the debut game from Wildflower Interactive, led by ex-Naughty Dog director Bruce Straley. The narrative adventure game stars an older woman and a strange plant monster as they work together to survive. However, it looks like their relationship might not be entirely smooth sailing, as the monster appears to turn on the woman at the end of the trailer.
Ontos
Fractional Games and Kepler Interactive were up next with a new look at ONTOS, a new first-person horror game that’s got some fucked up body horror shit happening. But this is the same team that made Soma, so that’s not surprising. It’s coming out in 2026.
Zenless Zone Zero
For the Hoyoverse sickos, a new character for Zenless Zone Zero was revealed.
2XKO
2XKO, the League of Legends fighting game, is coming to consoles in January, and Riot showed off a quick glimpse of Caitlyn as she’ll appear when she joins the roster.
Resident Evil Requiem
Next we got a new look at Resident Evil Requiem, and my husband Old Leon Kennedy was in this one. I didn’t hear a word anyone else said over the wedding bells. But you can watch it yourself. Game looks sick.
Order of the Sinking Star
Order of the Sinking Star is a fantasy puzzle game from Witness and Braid developer Jonathan Blow. It has over 1400 puzzles and is coming in 2026.
Exodus
Oh right, Matthew McConaughey is in this one. Exodus is an upcoming sci-fi action RPG shooter that looks like it’s trying to fill the Mass Effect-shaped hole in your heart. It’s from Dungeons & Dragons company Wizards of the Coast, so it’s got a pretty notable legacy behind it. We’ll see if it lives up to it when it launches in early 2027.
Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons
Wizards of the Coast isn’t done, though, as Battlestar Galactica and Mass Effect star Trisha Helfer took the stage to introduce Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons. The cinematic trailer confirmed the game will launch in 2027, with a proper gameplay reveal to come in 2026.
Control Resonant
Remedy showed up to announce the sequel to 2019’s Control. After an elaborate stage show that was probably a seizure hazard, we saw a cinematic trailer that I’m sure was comprehensible to those who finished the first game. It’s coming in 2026, and you can read more details about this bold, unusual sequel that Remedy shared with us here.
Gang of Dragon
Next, the trend of bloody trailers continued with Gang of Dragon, the first game from Nagoshi Studio, led by Toshihiro Nagoshi, one of the former leads behind the Yakuza series. It definitely feels in line with his previous work on Japanese crime dramas, so Yakuza fans will probably feel right at home.
Street Fighter movie
We’re taking a break from games for a moment with the first look at upcoming the Street Fighter live-action movie. There wasn’t a whole lot to glean about the story, but there’s plenty of punching, kicking, and other mayhem. Several members of the cast were present, and I am a total mark, because this totally got me. I’m ready to boot up Street Fighter 6 right now but there’s still like, two hours of this show left. Jesus.
Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight
Geoff had an extended conversation with a Batman minifig before showing off a new look at Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. That game is basically a new Arkham, and what I played of it earlier this year was pretty dope.
Tomb Raider hour
After an hour of teases, we finally got to see the next Tomb Raider game. The announcement began with a cinematic trailer in which Lara shoots up some scavengers, and it sounds like Alix Wilton Regan, known for her work as the Inquisitor in Dragon Age, is voicing her this time around. Good for her. The game is coming in 2027.
After this, we saw footage of Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, a remake of the original game from the ’90s. We got to see a little bit of Lara doing cool acrobatics and shooting up a dinosaurs, so she’s still doing what she does best. This one is coming in 2026.
Forest 3
Next, we saw a moody trailer for Forest 3 which for a second I thought might be Half-Life 3 because the logo started with the “3.” That one’s on me. My bad.
Invincible VS
The Invincible fighting game is coming in 2026, and we have our first look at new fighter Ella Mental.
Orbitals
Next we saw a short trailer for co-op game Orbitals, which Kotaku managing editor Carolyn Petit described as “anime Split Fiction,” and that’s a pretty apt comparison.
Diablo IV
After Mephisto, a big ol’ demon, roasted the audience on stage, Blizzard revealed Diablo IV‘s next expansion called Lord of Hatred with a grody cinematic trailer. It’s coming on April 28 and bringing some new classes and big changes to the game.
Marvel Rivals
After a long-ass wait, Deadpool is finally coming to Marvel Rivals. The merc with a mouth debuted with a stylish animated trailer, but unfortunately NetEase didn’t bring any gameplay with them to show us how he’ll play in-game. He’ll join the game next season in January, with Elsa Bloodstone to follow after.
007: First Light
In a new trailer we see that Lenny Kravitz is playing the villain in the upcoming James Bond game 007: First Light. This will be the musician’s first video game role.
Lords of the Fallen II
Next up is the first gameplay trailer for fantasy-soulslike sequel Lords of the Fallen II. The original game also has a new update out today.
Saros
Housemarque and actor Rahul Kohli showed up with a new trailer for the upcoming roguelike shooter Saros. The trailer focuses on the game’s story and characters, and the game is coming to PS5 on March 20.
No Law
No Law looks like Cyberpunk 2077‘s baby brother. Literally can’t think of another way to describe it.
Total War: Warhammer 40k
David Harbour of Stranger Things fame showed up to announce Total War: Warhammer 40k, because he’ll be in the game. The beloved strategy series is crossing over with Warhammer 40k, which means the Venn diagram of some of the sickest of sickos is converging when the game launches.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve
Bandai Namco was up next with Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, the next entry in its flight combat series. It’s launching in 2026.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer
Star Wars fans are eating tonight, as they’re soon getting not only an RPG, but also a racer. Star Wars: Galactic Racer will let you live out your podracing dreams in 2026.
Out of Words
If a stop-motion co-op platformer that’s probably gonna make you cry sounds like something you’d jive with, Out of Words is probably for you. It’s coming next year.
Phantom Blade 0
Next, we got a lengthy look at Phantom Blade 0, S-GAME’s upcoming wuxia action game. It looks like the kind of challenging, twitchy hack-and-slash you want from something like the modern day Ninja Gaiden games. It’s coming to PS5 and PC on September 9.
Mega Man Dual Overdrive
As we start to wind down, Capcom announced a new Mega Man game called Dual Overdrive. After a brief gameplay clip, the company announced it will launch in 2027.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
We got a short clip of the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy Movie in which Mario and Luigi face off against Bowser Jr. Luigi does get a pretty good knee to the kid’s face.
Highguard
Closing the show was Highguard, a new fantasy shooter by Wildlight Entertainment, a studio led by ex-Respawn folks who worked on Apex Legends and Titanfall. You can see some of that DNA in here with its focus on traversal and quick movement, which its mixing with its fusion of modern and fantasy weaponry. The game will launch on January 26, and is free to play.
We’re excited to share that a half-dozen Xbox first-party titles (plus one movie) have been nominated for awards across multiple categories – voting is now open on The Game Awards official site.
You can play many of the nominees announced today with Xbox Game Pass, including top nominee Clair Obscur: Expedition 33,Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, DOOM: The Dark Ages,South of Midnight, and Hollow Knight: Silksong.
Tune into The Game Awards on December 11 to see if your favorite games from 2025 take home an award.
The Game Awards has officially revealed the full list of nominees for the year, and we’re thrilled to see such a wide range of unique titles being recognized for their contributions to gaming. Even better, many of these nominees can be played today across Xbox consoles, Xbox on PC, ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, Cloud, and with Xbox Game Pass!
This year our first-party studios received nominations for Avowed, DOOM: The Dark Ages, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Ninja Gaiden 4, South of Midnight, and The Outer Worlds 2. Troy Baker’s pitch-perfect performance as Indiana Jones was recognized with a Best Performance nomination, and ‘A Minecraft Movie’, one of the biggest hits at the box office in 2025, was nominated for Best Adaptation.
We’re also equally excited to see that many of our third-party partners have been nominated across a wide range of categories – many of which can be played with Game Pass. Ball x Pit, Blue Prince, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Rematch are all up for awards this year, and playable across devices as Xbox Play Anywhere titles. Additionally, Game Pass subscribers receive incredible benefits for nominees League of Legends, Valorant, and – starting tomorrow – Fortnite.
Congratulations to all this year’s amazing nominees – and don’t forget, these nominations join titles on Xbox nominated across the Golden Joysticks, and even the Grammys!
Remember, you can vote for your favorites right now over at TheGameAwards.com. See below for the full list of nominees that you can play today.
We won’t have to wait too much longer to find out which game will follow the wonderful Astro Bot‘s triumph at last year’s edition of The Game Awards. The 2025 ceremony takes place on December 11 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. In between a cavalcade of video game trailers and announcements, the show will squeeze in some actual awards. We now know what the contenders for The Game Awards 2025 are after Monday’s announcement of the nominees.
Those vying for the top prize of game of the year are:
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II – Warhorse Studios/Deep Silver
Half of those are also up for game of the year at the Indie Game Awards. Those three games (Clair Obscur, Hades II and Hollow Knight: Silksong) are up for the best independent game award at this ceremony as well, alongside Absolum, Ball x Pit and Blue Prince.
With 12 nods in total — including three in the best performance category — Clair Obscur isn’t just the most-nominated game this year. It’s the most-nominated game in the 12-year history of the ceremony. Death Stranding 2 and Ghost of Yōtei have eight nods each, Hades II has seven and Silksong has five. Sony Interactive Entertainment leads the way among publishers with 19 nominations.
A whole bunch of high-profile games missed out on nominations for the main award. However, the likes of Arc Raiders, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Mario Kart World, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Elden Ring: Nightreign, Battlefield 6, Split Fiction, Monster Hunter Wilds and Silent Hill f have picked up nods in other categories. It’s neat to see games like Consume Me, Despelote, Rematch and Dispatch pick up nominations this year too. Meanwhile, Marvel’s Deadpool VR, a game that isn’t even out until tomorrow, picked up a nod.
Fan voting for this year’s edition of The Game Awards starts today on the TGA website. Public ballots account for 10 percent of the final vote, with a jury comprising dozens of media outlets accounting for the remaining 90 percent. The nominees for the players’ voice award — the only one determined entirely by fans — will be announced on December 1.
The Game Awards (which is under fire over its handling of the discontinued Future Class program) will be streaming across a wide variety of platforms, including Prime Video for the first time. As ever, we’ll be on top of all of the big news from the event, so stay tuned to Engadget for all the juicy details. Place your bets now on what will be announced. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get a glimpse of Half-Life 3?
Younès Rabii and dozens of The Game Awards’ Future Class signed an open letter that, among other things, asked TGA to call for a long-term ceasefire in Gaza. In solidarity, AI researcher and game designer Mike Cook explained what’s wrong with the assertion that spaces like TGA should stay out of it and just “stick with games.”
While the idea of “getting political” at an awards show is a divisive topic, it’s not new to TGA. Just last year, TGA tweeted (some now deleted) acknowledgements on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and supported fundraising efforts. Gaming companies took symbolic stands, too, like EA removing Russian cosmetics from FIFA.
In 2021, amid back-to-back mass sexual harassment and labor abuse suits from companies like Activision Blizzard, TGA founder/host/producer Geoff Keighley (with support of Activision) pulled them from everything but nominations and offered a statement we’d later come to realize was probably an empty platitude.
So, in late November, members of TGA’s Future Class—a group of gaming industry professionals TGA highlights every year to “represent the bright, bold and inclusive future of video games”—published an open letter asking for three key things from the ceremony: investments against the dehumanization of South-West Asian and North African people in the gaming space, expression of support of Palestinian life, and a call for a long-term ceasefire in Gaza.
Open letter to The Game Awards
The games industry’s silence on the Palestinian genocide is disgusting, and this needs to change.
To all gamedevs: Please read our letter to The Game Awards, sign it, and share it as much as you can. Palestinians need all the support we can give ✊???
I don’t often publicly talk about being a member of the Game Awards Future Class, but any nods towards diversity and inclusion are meaningless if we can’t even acknowledge the ongoing genocide of Palestinians https://t.co/rowEXCsBhn
Despite the past statements from TGA, Geoff Keighley and others stayed silent this year. I don’t mean that figuratively, like how he ignored the industry labor protest outside the theater. Leaked images show that when Keighley was directly confronted with his failure to respond in the Future Class Discord, he literally replied with a silent two-second voice reply before he deleted it.
While 83 past and current members of the Future Class signed this letter, others didn’t. Among many things, developer Amiad Fredman criticized the letter’s lack of Hamas condemnation. Also, despite widespread acknowledgement from scholars of genocide in and outside of Israel, he questioned the use of the word “genocide.” According to Axios, Rabii said in response, “There was a strong idea that advocating for Palestinian human rights immediately meant supporting the taking of hostages in Israel, the civilian lives being lost in Israel. That’s not the case, of course.”
Growing frustrated by the people pushing back against a call for action from the TGA, Cook took to their blog. Three days before the awards began, Cook published Mostly Harmless to address the sentiments of people sympathetic enough to see the genocide but who feel it needs to stay separate from gaming.
Answering: Why would the games industry need to say anything about Palestine?
Cook begins by pointing to the relationship between the gaming and weapons manufacturing industries. They cite an in-depth look from a 2012 Eurogamer piece to show how far back this criticism stretches. That article mentions how, during the Sandy Hook school shooting trial, documents revealed Remington paid Call of Duty to include their gun models in the game for brand recognition.
Then, Cook moved to a much more widespread and pervasive issue. The gaming industry maintains close ties with many of the militaries involved in the murder and suffering of Palestinians. For Palestinians living as second-class citizens in Israel, Microsoft provides apartheid-maintaining surveillance tech to Israel. Jewish and Arab tech workers have been ousted for speaking up against this. Additionally, the U.S. Army advertises on Twitch (directly and with influencers) and sponsors eSports activities.
The US military uses games as a recruitment tool in just about every conceivable way, no matter how bizarre, but it also uses it as a propaganda tool.
Cook
Reaching a 10-player killstreak in COD:Modern Warfare (2019) earns players a white phosphorus perk. The chemical weapon’s use in conflict is a war crime. Despite this, Israel reportedly released American-made white phosphorus onto Gazaand Lebanon. In COD:MW II (2022) you have to point your gun at someone to complete the objective of “de-escalat[ing] civilians.”
I’m not trying to pick on COD, because it’s not just them. Other FPS games, thrive on modes where players confront terrorists, free hostages, and defuse bombs. (Often, these terrorist have vaguely Latin American, African, Arab, or Eastern European accents.) COD just includes the most egregious examples of propaganda.
In the second half, Cook stresses that games aid in the dehumanization of Black and brown people by entertainment. They don’t even get into the Islamophobic voice chats rampant in games. Cook zeroes in on narrative gaming where “accented” brown people rarely appear as anything other than villains’ or “one of the good ones” aiding the protagonist.
Pulling from POC criticism for years, Cook points to entertainment showing Muslims as “villainous, barbaric, backwards or helpless” for decades. Kotaku Senior Editor Alyssa Mercante discussed this in a recent interview with Rabii, Rami Ismail, Tamoor Hussain, and Nadia Shammas.
Meanwhile, games with bigotry allegories common to racialized people are a dime a dozen. This colors games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Detroit: Become Human. Even TGA Game of the Year Baldur’s Gate 3 is backdropped against a Tiefling refugee crisis. One of the biggest games in years, The Last of Us (series), took heavy inspiration from the conflict Israel and Palestine. Creator Neil Druckmann spent his early childhood on an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank (Palestine), and his centrist approach reflects in the work—a work that was present at the awards as Druckmann took to the TGA stage to accept the statue for Best Adapted Work.
Another failure of The Game Awards
In 25 years, The Game Awards will celebrate the ‘bravery’ and ‘importance’ of a game retelling the Palestinian genocide but it will not say a word until speaking out will be absolutely meaningless.
What is the meaning of handing out Diversity and Inclusion awards to dead people? https://t.co/68SqQzQzG0
Cook ends with this thesis: The cultural capital of the gaming industry has real influence on the world. While Cook’s blog is about Palestine, this could easily be extended to other regions facing equally dire conditions—places like the Congo, where the mineral used to power our phones and electronics, cobalt, is fought for.
As of writing, the letter has over 3,071 total signatures and now includes mine. The signatories range from storyboarding artists and game testers to game design professors and journalists. Peaking at 3.6 million current viewers, TGA had an incredible opportunity to exert that influence in a positive way. This isn’t projecting American values, either, because most countries represented at the awards are also voting for a ceasefire.
With the current state of the game industry, silence is a message.
Silence is tacit support.
Silence is dehumanization of Palestinian lives.
Open letter to The Game Awards
Thirsty Suitors‘ designer Meghna Jayanth tried to use this for good at the Golden Joysticks Awards before they ultimately canceled her appearance. This censoring is, in part, what moved Rabii and most of the other members of a class—part of TGA’s diversity and inclusion efforts—to ask better of TGA, so that TGA could be the voice of gaming worldwide, rather than just of America and American companies. After all, the hesitation or condemnation of calling for a ceasefire is almost entirely an American/British affair.
BREAKING: The US just vetoed the UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The US was the only vote against. The UK abstained.
Our government is actively enabling & supporting the Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.
At the opening of last night’s 2023 edition of The Game Awards, host Geoff Keighley hyped the event as an evening “to recognize outstanding creative work in games in 2023.” But as the night went on, the luminaries who were being awarded for their “outstanding creative work” seemed like they weren’t given much time to actually speak about said work.
The Top 10 Most-Played Games On Steam Deck: October 2023 Edition
The Game Awards is held at the end of every year, ostensibly to celebrate and award the labor that goes into the video games we spend countless hours enjoying. As at most awards shows, it’s customary for winners to give a bit of a speech, thanking those who helped make their game, and thus the award, possible. But this year it felt like time was cut short for most developers. Some have speculated that The Game Awards was worried someone might mentionthe serious labor issuesfacing the industry, or yet scarier, the current conflict in Gaza, thus inviting that most dreaded of phenomena: controversy. Whatever the reason, it was a night that always felt too out of time for the people it was ostensibly supposed to be about.
Throughout the night, orchestral music floated in very soon after most award winners began speaking. That might be a good policy for keeping such a stacked event moving, but when you consider just how much time was devoted to celebrities, muppets, and conversations with high-profile developers like Hideo Kojima (who Aftermath estimates gobbled up as much time as 13.5 of the night’s truncated winner speeches would have), it’s not hard to feel like The Game Awards failed to prioritize its time well. And many awards, probably most, went without anyone coming up on stage at all, getting just quick, cursory-feeling readouts of the winners from Keighley or his cohost before it was time to cut to another ad break, announce a new game, or invite a celebrity onstage.
After a year of constant, highly public layoffsacross the industry, ushering developers offstage while granting celebrities all the time they could ask for feels uniquely out of step. Running large events relying on commercial support is no easy task, but surely there must be a better way to schedule things out so that, in Keighley’s own words, we can actually “recognize outstanding creative work.”
Attendees report a large, ominous teleprompter message reading “Please Wrap It Up,”” which as Javier Cordero pointed out on Twitter (presently known as “X”), was even on display while people from Larian Studios tried to talk about what developing the game meant to them while they accepted the most prestigious award of the night: Game of the Year.
The speech of Larian’s Swen Vincke brought tears to the eyes of his team members in the audience. He talked about what Baldur’s Gate 3 meant to the team, how it was the team’s pandemic project and how they lost Jim Southworth, lead cinematic artist on Baldur’s Gate 3, to cancer just last month. This was easily one of the most human moments in the nearly four-hour onslaught of non-stop commercialism, but hey, Please Wrap It Up, right?
Another odd moment came when CD Projekt Red took home the award for Best Ongoing Game. After being introduced by actor Anthony Mackie, who spent a chunk of time bantering with the audience (to everyone’s confusion) and plugging season two of Twisted Metal on Peacock. But when Gabriel Amatangelo and Paweł Sasko actually got on stage to collect their award, they were given scant time before the music started up.
This morning, Geoff Keighley himself recognized that, “while no one was cut off,” the music indeed felt like it came in too quickly.
But, as Axios’ Stephen Totilo shared, it’s not like the “wrap it up music” was automated. “I can confirm” he wrote on Twitter, “there was manual control of when to start the 30-second countdown to the ‘please wrap it up’ sign, manual control of when to make it flash. Was tweakable.”
Celebrities are entertaining and ads do pay the bills necessary to keep a show running, but hopefully future Game Awards shows will allocate developers as much time as Gonzo the muppet was given to talk about the work they and their teams put in to earn their recognition. Give folks time to enjoy their deserved moment in the spotlight, or else let’s just call The Game Awards what it is: Winter E3.
Without a doubt, Baldur’s Gate 3 has been the talk of the town at least as far as the video game industry is concerned this year. Developed by Larian Studios, best known for making Divinity: Original Sin, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a DND-style RPG and it’s been lauded by critics across the board for its fantastic story and characterization.
The RPG swept up a whole ton of awards at The Game Awards 2023, and as you might’ve already guessed, it won the award of the night as well, the much coveted Game of the Year award. As usual, the announcement was preceded by a fantastic medley by the TGA orchestra, and the award was presented by actor Timothee Chalamet, who appeared in Dune, and is set to star in the upcoming Willy Wonka movie as well.
Since its release, Baldur’s Gate 3 has received a number of patches and updates to improve the game even further. Patch 5 was its most exciting one yet, introducing the new Honour Mode difficulty, throwing in a shoutout to Bing Bong, and also allowed players to finally obtain Orin’s cool outfit.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is now available on PC and consoles.
About the author
Zhiqing Wan
Zhiqing is the Reviews Editor for Twinfinite, and a History graduate from Singapore. She’s been in the games media industry for nine years, trawling through showfloors, conferences, and spending a ridiculous amount of time making in-depth spreadsheets for min-max-y RPGs. When she’s not singing the praises of Amazon’s Kindle as the greatest technological invention of the past two decades, you can probably find her in a FromSoft rabbit hole.
No matter what social network you’re on, you can’t get far on the internet these past few months without running into some kind of fan fervor over Astarion, the sharp-tongued (and sharp-toothed!) vampire from Baldur’s Gate 3, voiced by Neil Newbon, who deserves a Game Awards win this year.
This article contains spoilers for Act 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Flirty, witty, and always down to raise a little hell, Astarion’s flirtatious front has turned him into a veritable poster boy of internet thirst—thanks in no small part to a deliciously charismatic voice acting performance from Newbon. But while Astarion’s sex appeal and sense of humor were what initially made him so popular with fans, to write him off as simply a droll pretty boy would be to grossly underestimate both Newbon’s performance and the strength of writer Stephen Rooney’s story.
Though that’s certainly how the character initially presents himself, the game eventually reveals unexpected layers of tragedy and pain, giving way to a beautifully cathartic arc about escaping abuse and overcoming trauma. Certainly, the charisma and gusto with which Newbon imbues Astarion is awards-worthy in its own right, but it’s the moments of of vulnerability, pain, and honesty that are truly what a Performer of the Year win would be recognizing.
When players first meet Astarion Ancunin, he’s literally playing dumb—feigning incompetence and begging for the player’s help in defeating an unseen monster, only to put his knife to our throats at the first chance. Though he may put on the front of an aristocratic dandy, the real Astarion is cunning, shrewd, and (quite literally) cutthroat—the damsel-in-distress fakeout could not be a more perfect introduction that encapsulates Astarion’s strategy for manipulating others and navigating the world.
It takes a few long rests, but it’s quickly revealed in Act One that the reason for (at least some of) Astarion’s initial caginess is that he’s a vampire and is wary of being ousted by the others at camp—hence the act. But between the red eyes, the pale skin, and the visible puncture wounds on his throat, it’s not exactly a difficult reveal to piece together, and his status as a vampire spawn just barely scratches the surface of the character’s trauma.
Astarion isn’t just a vampire spawn—for several hundred years, he’s been the tortured plaything of Cazador, a cruel vampire lord living in Baldur’s Gate 3. In addition to forcing Astarion to eat only rats and regularly having him (and his other vampire “siblings”) tortured, Cazador also forced the spawn to use themselves as literal honeypots, seducing unsuspecting victims and bringing them to Cazador’s door through seduction and manipulation.
It’s a powerful story on its own, but the situation is further complicated for players by the fact that before these revelations, Astarion has been consistently attempting to seduce the player so he can use them as his own personal “blood bag” over the course of their journey. Suddenly, Newbon’s choice to play Astarion as hyper-seductive and ultra-alluring takes on a more tragic angle: It’s not just harmless (slightly excessive) flirtation born of genuine attraction; it’s a defense mechanism Astarion has been forced to use to survive for years.
The heartbreaking reveal isn’t just a powerful character moment and an opportunity for Newbon to flex his dramatic muscles as Astarion recounts his past, but also a way for the game to challenge the player’s preexisting expectations about seductive characters in gaming and unravel the hypersexualized fantasy version of the character that’s (ironically) become so popular online. Should the player choose, you can opt to end your sexual relationship with Astarion once his past is revealed, and offer to move forward simply as friends—Astarion responds with cautious optimism that he’s never had a real friend before.
Though his stinging insults and snarky comebacks make even the most mundane of encounters entertaining, the rawness in Astarion’s voice in moments where he’s forced to shed his carefully-crafted persona and let himself put faith in others is where Newbon shines most. Players witness in real time as he begins to reckon with his trauma and bring his walls down—eventually culminating in Astarion breaking down in screams and sobs after he finally puts an end to Cazador, freeing himself once and for all.
It’s a dizzyingly tall order for any voice actor to be equally as comfortable (and effective) in moments of extreme vulnerability, trauma, and grief as they are delivering cheeky quips and saucy one-liners, but through it all, Newbon is there to wring every last drop of emotion from Rooney’s dialogue. It’s no wonder, then, why have gamers have taken so ardently to the character: Yes, he’s certainly attractive, but it’s his unexpected depth and familiar uncertainty that make him so deeply endearing. Underneath the barbs and veneer is someone utterly broken but learning to heal.
Perhaps more than anything else, though, it’s his genuine love for and understanding of Astarion that makes Newbon’s performance so effective and impactful. As he explained in his Golden Joystick acceptance speech, Newbon relates to the character beyond just bringing him to life as an actor.
“He is a survivor. He has gone through trauma. And I’ve had so many people from the community reach out to me personally to talk about the stories that our characters have also shared, they identify with many stories and characters in the game, and the game’s story itself has really reached them,” Newbon said.
“And people have come up to me and said that they felt inspired to deal with their own trauma. As a survivor myself, I understand when they talk to me about it what they mean.” Through Astarion, Newbon, Rooney, and the rest of the team haven’t just created an iconic video game character: They’ve crafted a poignant, honest, often heartbreaking but ultimately cathartic and hopeful exploration of what it looks like to confront your past head-on and come out stronger for it.
