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The bestselling game of 2024 got zero Game Award nominations

The Game Awards missed a pretty big one, somehow shutting one of 2024's record breaking games out of the process.

By Brian Allen

Utah v Colorado
Utah v Colorado / Andrew Wevers/GettyImages
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It's an interesting year for The Game Awards, and the industry as a whole. After 2023 delivered blockbusters such as Spider-Man 2, Baldur's Gate 3, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom, 2024's offerings were a little more demure. Black Myth: Wukong, for example, is one of the lowest-rated Game of the Year nominees in history.

It's such a down year for The Game Awards that Elden Ring DLC is up for GOTY. Elden Ring's an incredible game, but will it still be eligible for awards next year if nothing else stacks up? This could be a long-term problem. If this year's games had to compete against Skyrim, none of these nominees would stand a chance.

It would have been a good year to break with tradition and throw a sports game into the mix, but that doesn't happen often. EA Sports College Football 25 belongs there, as it's the bestselling title of 2024 in the United States. I don't mean the bestselling sports title, I mean the best title overall.

The fourth-highest seller is the EA MVP Bundle, which packages CFB 25 with Madden 25, meaning the game essentially has two spots on the bestselling game chart. The game's decade-long absence helped drive hype, but that alone doesn't generate sales. Did anybody reading this get around to playing Duke Nukem Forever?

Making matters even worse, CFB 25 somehow didn't get nominated for Best Sports Game of the Year. That's just ridiculous, as its Metacritic rating puts it above every other nominee in the category. If we're not ranking the best game by sales, or by its reviews, than what are we doing?

CFB 25 brought people back to gaming that hadn't played in a decade. It moved Xbox consoles, for crying out loud. Its exclusion signals that something has gone badly wrong in the voting/nominating process.

I can only call it sports bias. It's hard to imagine that if an RPG or shooter broke the sales records and had the impact that CFB 25 has had, it would somehow get completely shut out of the year's biggest awards.