The gaming year used to follow a predictable rhythm: we’d have a flurry of announcements in the summer, around the gaming trade event E3, then a rush of releases between September and the end of November – and then absolutely nothing would happen until March at the earliest. But now E3 is gone for good, and the Game Awards – the industry’s most glamorous and also most intensely commercial awards show – takes place in early December, so we suddenly have an eye-watering number of new trailers and debuts right as we’re all preparing to hibernate.
I didn’t watch this year’s show live (it started at 12.30am UK time last Saturday morning and was over three hours long) and I’m betting that most of you didn’t watch it either, so here are the headlines: Baldur’s Gate 3 won nearly everything; as ever the awards felt like something that had to be squeezed in around all the trailers; there was not very much time given to developers to speak, which rankled; The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Spider-Man 2 were snubbed in several categories (Zelda won best action adventure game, Spider-Man won nothing).
