The Game Awards To Have Better Security This Year

Oh, it is nearly that time of year when I sit and snark while Alexx ignores me and does his own swearing at Geoff Keighley. With The Game Awards around the corner, a number of questions come up, and while some of those go unanswered, host Geoff Keighley did a Q&A livestream on Sunday about the awards this year. Several topics came up, but the most important is the question of those running on stage and commanding attention. I’m not talking about Josef Fares and his feelings about the Oscars.

It seems everyone has taken to calling him “Bill Clinton kid,” but that wazzock that jumped on stage last year was the catalyst. At Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, this occurrence was further exhausted as another of the wazzock clan ran on stage to shout about GTA 6. I say a lot of mean things about Geoff, but power to him for holding himself together for all of that, it is ridiculous it happens in the first place. Well, the only Ken not to appear in Barbenheimer this year has made clear that steps are being taken to prevent it from happening again.

When asked directly about it Keighley said, “Yeah, we are.” Going on to state, “We don’t want to talk about that stuff too publicly, just because it’s security.” Power to you, you bland man! He has more to contend with before he has to deal with the idea of someone he doesn’t know running up to him while clamoring for attention.

However, that isn’t the only thing that the yearly advertisements host was asked about. When asked about the incessant “World Premiere” package played on a loop, he said, “Actually, you’ll see this year, we often put up those cards, ‘world premiere, world premiere,’ we’re kind of moving away from that, just because everything’s kind of, ‘is it a first look? Is it an announcement?’ etc. So we just treat it all as great game content.” When asked how many world premieres there will be, the answer was “around the same.” Sounds like it is about the same Geoff, not moving away.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Q&A if we didn’t talk about the controversy and Geoff addressed this year’s edition early. Many people love the fish-murder game Dave the Diver, for obvious reasons, but many have taken to calling Mint Rocket a pseudo-indie at best. The studio might be small, but being a smaller portion of the billion-yen South Korean-formed but Japanese-based publisher Nexon is the big question of “how indie are you really?”

When asked about it Geoff said, “Independent can mean different things to different people and it’s sort of a broad term, right?” You’re telling me, you’d think indie survivor crafting horror would be narrow, but it seems to be wider than the term indie to some people sometimes. He goes on to state, “So yeah, Dave the Diver. That game is made by a group named Mint Rocket, it’s a smaller game from a smaller group but it’s part of Nexon, they’re employees of Nexon which is a very large publisher. So I think it’s a fair debate and discussion – is that game truly independent, or is it not?”

Keighley concludes with “You can argue it either way. It’s independent in spirit and that it’s a small game with a – I don’t know what the budget is – relatively small budget, but it’s from a larger entity, whereas there are other games on that list from much smaller studios.” As the Ken Doll says, this is a discussion we need to have because it is just complicating things as they stand and makes it no easier when this comes up.

Those of us who want to go through the pain of half a million premieres of a worldy scale can do so next Thursday, December 7th. Streamed through Twitch, YouTube, and other platforms that I’m far too old for, you’ll be able to watch The Game Awards from 4:30 PM PT/ 7:30 PM ET.