I’m sure you’re wondering, “What the heck is a Game of the Year article doing on DualShockers? Is it already December?” Well, don’t worry, you haven’t gone crazy or entered some sort of time-altering portal just yet.
In 2020, we’re doing Game of the Year a bit differently here at DualShockers, at least when it comes to our initial discussions. Rather than holding all of our conversations until the end of the calendar year to determine our own Game of the Year winner, we’re breaking all of 2020’s biggest releases down over the course of the year instead.
To shed some light on why we’re making this change, we found that at the end of 2019, our internal discussions when trying to determine a Game of the Year winner were far too exhaustive come December. We had twelve months worth of new games that we needed to talk about all at once by the end of 2019 which led to our year-end talks taking far longer than we would have liked. In a time where dozens upon dozens of video games now release each month, to hold all conversation in the final month of the year was a tall task and naturally, games that came out earlier in the year tended to fall by the wayside. Plus, the whole process felt too fast because of how many titles we needed to discuss in a confined period of time.
So this year, we’re taking our time with Game of the Year and are breaking things down on a quarter-by-quarter basis. In this first edition of our Game of the Year 2020 series, we’re talking about the titles that released in the first three months of the year, meaning everything from January through March. This includes notable releases such as DOOM Eternal, Persona 5 Royal, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Half-Life: Alyx, and many more.
To make this clear, we’re also not determining any GOTY “winners” of sorts in these discussions. Our staff-wide conversation, which you can find in the video above, is more of just a way for everyone on our team to talk about how they feel about the year’s releases so far. We talk about any potential positives, negatives, and whether or not we think certain titles will then be in the running for our final Game of the Year 2020 winner at the end of the year.
Again, we’ll be doing one of these every quarter, too. So our next discussion for the second quarter (April-June) will arrive in July, the third quarter (July-September) will be in October, and so on. This will all conclude in December when we then release our fourth quarter discussion, which will then be followed by our final conversation to determine the year’s official Game of the Year winner at DualShockers. Hopefully, that all makes sense.
This is definitely something different for us and we hope that you enjoy this new process we’re moving forward with! If you check out our video above, let us know what you think down in the comments on this article or on the YouTube video. We’re definitely looking for feedback on ways to potentially improve this over the course of the year.
The post DualShockers’ Game of the Year 2020 — First Quarter Discussion by Logan Moore appeared first on DualShockers.