Ah, December. In my book the only month where it’s appropriate to start claiming “this X thing was the best of the year”. And even then you better keep your eyes peeled until December 31st just in case. Alas, award shows often do not share my sentiment of actually waiting until the year is over to begin judging, and it’s around this time of year that you’ll be hearing what song earned this award, what game won this, which anime won that, etc. Game awards, a once unheard of concept, are now pretty big news and rightfully so I say. Gaming poses just as much if not more artistic value than its contemporary mediums. So get out there and vote to your heart's content at what titles truly deserve it this year. But what happens if the games themselves try to influence your heart a little bit?

This year Genshin Impact got a bit of pushback from people (likely many Sonic fans, as Sonic Frontiers and Genshin Impact faced off in a close vote for the Players Choice Award at The Game Awards 2022. This caused Sonic fans to look for any weak point the gacha giant might have, and they did find one. Is it really fair for a game to reward its players for voting? Genshin Impact has a long history of giving out a fair amount of Primogems, the premium currency, every time the community manages to snag up another award that MiHoYo can put on the trophy shelf. While not guaranteed, it’s definitely implied at this point that helping to vote for Genshin may earn you some extra goodies down the road. Is that fair to other titles like Sonic Frontiers? In my eyes not really. That’s essentially saying “Hey vote for my political party. Last year after we won everyone got $1,000… so perhaps you’d like to participate this time.” In reality someone may think Genshin has been boring lately or undelivered on some aspects, but will still vote for it simply for the rewards.

"Well first, you log onto this website, then you vote by..."

I should note this concept is not a new or isolated incident. Yu-Gi-Oh: Master Duel does a similar tactic where they give away a ton of currency after they reach a Twitter follower milestone, and that shit must work pretty well because I feel like they reach a new milestone and dish out a new round of rewards every couple of months. I’m pretty torn on this issue. The reviewer half of me wants to say stop this shit, people shouldn’t have this extra bias when voting for a game. However, the gamer in me is like hey if these games want to give me free rewards for basically free as the community most likely will do the work without me even having to participate, sure thing buddy sign me up for my free gems. Even if I had a strong stance against the idea, how do you govern such a thing? “No, STOP giving out free shit to your players in the award season, we’re keeping this shit honest baby”. That will go over great with the community, I’m sure.

"Screw the rules, give them fake money."

For the foreseeable future I don’t see an easy solution here, and it’s hard to even measure how much of a problem this is or isn’t. Hell I don’t think Sonic Frontiers beats Genshin Impact in any conceivable fashion regardless of the extra rewards. So while Genshin had a clear lead in the polls, who's to say that lead was mostly impacted by the game quality or the potential rewards. Still this trend of influencing a community to vote or follow does seem to motivate players to get to the polls or click that follow button, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see other titles doing it down the road. Do you think this trend will cause problems, or that it's basically a harmless reward for people who voted? Did you vote in The Game Awards this year? Do you care about award shows at all? Whip out a pencil, mark down your game, and leave your ballot in the comments below!