In order to implement something like that, you’d need to rank awards from most important to least important, and it’s possible that every nominated game would have been disqualified for the later awards. There’s basically no way to prevent multiple awards going to a single game with a rule.

The difference between the Steam Awards and the VGA is that the VGA is a bunch of industry insiders who voted, so there’s a risk people will discuss their votes beforehand with each other, leading to bandwagoning.

I’d back that. Possibly GOTY and genre GOTY, but then none of the “Best Soundtrack”, “Best Gameplay” and such. I think if a game is winning the top prize, it’s already pretty obvious it’s doing many of the aspect categories well too, so give some of the Spotlight to games that really shine in that particular aspect.

A friend of mine keeps making the argument of “What, we need to say ‘you’re winning too much’ and give pity prizes to the others? If it’s the best, it’s the best.” and I think that’s typically fine until we have years where games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Expedition 33 come out and make the award ceremony boring and not giving other games awards they deserve. My example this year is Dispatch and the difference between TGA and the Steam Awards. Dispatch is my personal GOTY, I love it, but I can easily say the gameplay was meh. Why I love it is the fact it absolutely nailed comic book superhero stories up-to-and-including the delayed gratification of the waiting period to think and theorise before the next piece comes out so, for a Story award category, I don’t think anything beats it.

Part of the challenge is not that many people played Dispatch compared to E33 so giving a much smaller competitor the award, I think, would be a great way of pointing the spotlight on an amazing work of art and possibly get more people to give it a go, possibly coming to a similar opinion on their own. Filtering out the crap and helping us players focus our time on the worthwhile games is already part of what we expect from gaming journalists, so why not a prestige event too?

Edit: Didn’t realise how much I rambled on for before hitting post so TL;DR: Individualising awards = Yay

Mark Kermode is a film critic that I absolutely adore.

He had the Kermode Awards every year (he’s quite self-deprecating about it) … the winners for his awards are ones that cannot be nominated by the Academy Awards.

It’s normally to highlight the missing actors/actresses/movies that he’s enjoyed over the year. Feels like something like that would be cool too.