The Game Awards is a show that advertises itself as celebrating the best and the brightest in the gaming industry, but that claim rings a bit hollow when a relevant part of the gaming industry appears to be excluded.
I’m talking about The Game Awards in particular, mostly due to its reach and recognized position among the public as “the” Game Awards. That being said, this article pretty much applies to all gaming-focused award ceremonies, as the issue is pervasive.
I’d like to preface the considerations I’ll make with the fact that I feel tremendous respect for the hard work, blood, and sweat that placed The Game Awards at the top of the category, and Geoff Keighley himself deserves to be recognized among everyone in media as a relevant example of the fact that decades of commitment and perseverance do make a difference.
Yet, it’s exactly because of that respect that I believe that position should also come with a responsibility to go above and beyond the call of duty to truly represent the gaming industry as a whole.
As the headline says, The Game Awards have a simulation problem, and the tip of the iceberg is the absolutely absurd “Best Sim/Strategy Game” category.
Simulation games are already an amalgam of genres. For instance, vehicular simulators are very different from The Sims. Yet, even if we consider simulation games a single genre, it has very little in common with strategy games, besides the fact that strategy games usually simulate some sort of conflict, but almost all games “simulate” some sort of thing.
The fact that they’re compressed in the same category does a disservice to both genres, as their developers see their chances to be honored halved.
Perhaps one could believe this would make sense if there were too few strategy and simulation games to have a relevant pool to select a winner from, but they’re among the most prolific genres in the gaming industry.
In fact, some very relevant, beloved, and critically acclaimed games released this year, like Europa Universalis 5, have inexplicably been excluded from the 2025 nominations, most likely because there wasn’t enough room. That’s what happens when you squish two genres with tens of great games in the same category.
Of course, the fact that the award was announced in a hurry, among three others, without even giving the winner 10 seconds for a speech or even the time to get on stage to receive the trophy, doesn’t help at all.
The whole thing is a massive mess that would at least be mitigated if simulation games and strategy games had their own categories, and please don’t tell me that there isn’t enough time.
There’s all the time in the world in a three-hour show, and if they really can’t shave off some of the most in-your-face ads (I am not blind to the fact that a show of this magnitude costs money to run), they could at least not bore us with irrelevant variety content.
I am sorry, not sorry, but you won’t convince me that you have no time to split an award to properly honor the developers of two very relevant macro-genres of gaming, and to give said developers a few seconds under the spotlight.
That would make sense if the show was actually tight, but you prove that you have plenty of time when you give a bunch of actors of the Street Fighter movie 5 minutes to prance and shout haphazardly on stage (while giving only 1 minute to the winner of the award they were supposed to present) and even more so when you allocate 4 minutes to Miss Piggy.
Incidentally, there isn’t a single vehicle simulation among the nominees of Best Sim/Strategy Game, but F1 25, which is absolutely a simulator, has been ejected and bunched with the Sports/Racing games, almost like it has anything in common with Mario Kart World. Really?
Yet, things are even worse if we take a look at other categories in which simulators should absolutely shine due to their very nature.
The first is Best Ongoing Game. Some of the largest simulators offer ongoing content that absolutely dwarfs anything you see from many of the games that did get nominated.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 delivered years of absolutely massive, high-quality updates, including regions of the world, aircraft, and more content. These are things that almost every other developer would make you pay for, and it wouldn’t be cheap.
Just look at the roadmap for 2025. I’m not even counting the Stranger Things crossover, which is monumentally good, but was released likely too late to be considered when the nominations were cast (and is marked simply as “surprise” below).
Of what you see above, the vast majority was free content, including all of the world updates and city updates. On top of that, we received high-quality aircraft and plenty of Sim Updates that changed the core of the game to what is arguably the best flight simulator on the market and one of the best games in the industry at the moment of this writing.
MSFS 2024 isn’t even the only example of a game that was mysteriously snubbed by those who decided the nominees. American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 are more mindboggling omissions.
They receive massive regional DLC at a breathtaking pace, but they are no slouches even in terms of free content, with plenty of new trucks, consistent updates, and radical reworks of older regions.
Especially Euro Truck Simulator 2, it’s one of those few games that has consistently grown its user base on Steam since its release twelve years ago. How many games can you find that achieved similar results?
It surpassed its peak once again with the release of the latest DLC just a few weeks ago. Passing 72,000 concurrent users on Steam.
We’re not talking about small, niche, or unpopular games here. We’re talking about games enjoyed by millions of gamers. And yet, they’re conspicuously absent from the Best Ongoing Game category. They have never been nominated despite having been prominent examples of what a “best ongoing game” should be, for years.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not a jab at No Man’s Sky’s win. Hello Games certainly deserves it (and this isn’t the first year they deserve it). This is not about who won, but it’s about who was given a chance to win by being nominated.
In fact, most of the games nominated are also deserving, but as a Final Fantasy XIV fan, I wouldn’t be able to argue in good faith that the game had a good year. Even if I personally enjoyed Dawntrail and its following content more than most, it’s obvious that they have disappointed many.
Final Fantasy XIV had many years in which it deserved the “Best Ongoing Game” nomination and even the win, and I’m pretty confident that it’ll get there again, but not this year. I can’t shake the feeling that those who selected the nominations did so very superficially. FFXIV is generally known as a game that’s good in its ongoing nature, and it’s pretty much nominated every year, so they slapped it into the bunch again because of pure inertia.
And the Best Ongoing Game certainly isn’t the only category in which games like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 or Euro Truck Simulator 2 would deserve a nod.
Best Community Support is another. Simulators like these tend to have very active community teams due to their ongoing nature, and both the games I mentioned have some of the best and most consistent community activities I know, from MSFS 2024’s weekly Community Fly-ins to ETS2’s frequent developer livestreams and community events.
Of course, their communities are also supported plenty with the generous intakes of new free and paid content I mentioned above.
Interestingly, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 just welcomed another big community with the PS5 release, while the Truck Simulators will do so next year with their own launch on consoles, but this chance to recognize them was ignored.
MSFS 2024 is also an interesting case because it doesn’t just host a community of users, but also a massive community of third-party developers, many of which create fantastic free add-ons (further feeding the “ongoing game” relevance), while many others create payware ones.
There’s a whole industry of folks who rely on MSFS 2024 for their livelihood as they create aircraft, scenery, and more, and that’s a relevant kind of community that all but one of the nominees don’t have.
Going even further, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 created a developer community within the community by actually involving third-party developers in the development of the simulator itself.
Tens of studios, from solo developers coming from the community to larger companies, have been directly hired to lend their expertise in an unprecedented operation in the gaming industry that truly lends credence to the tagline that MSFS 2024 was created “for the community, with the community.”
As a matter of fact, one of these Teams (Working Title) was picked by Microsoft from the community and supported in becoming a studio that now contributes to creating some of the most relevant core systems of MSFS 2024. This is another shining example of “for the community, with the community.”
Yet, the jury that decided the nominations for Best Community Support at The Game Awards simply copied and pasted the list from last year. Are these deserving games? Sure. Could we use a bit of variety? Most definitely.
Even the winner was copied and pasted from last year. Baldur’s Gate 3 is another game I adore, and I have all the respect in the world for its community team, but I’m not sure what they did this year that is more deserving to be recognized than personally leading your community to fly in massive groups all over the world every week (and that’s just one of many examples).
Ultimately, the problem is not very challenging to identify. The jury of The Game Awards is composed in the largest part by mainstream gaming media, big websites that cover games not inspired by passion, but railroaded by SEO.
You see very little coverage of simulators on these websites, not because they’re unpopular (they are not), but because they’re somehow considered unglamorous and unable to drive big traffic from search engines like Google (and its absolutely unsightly cesspit offshoot called Google Discover). Unfortunately, that’s dangerously close to everything these websites care about.
It isn’t very surprising that these media professionals who form the jury don’t nominate the games that they do not cover unless there’s some occasional big headline to write, like a new platform or some sort of drama. If they did nominate them, they’d delegitimize their own vision and coverage of the industry.
Of course, the lack of media coverage for simulation games that absolutely deserve it is already a serious issue in its own right, but that’s a story for another day.
At this point, I’m fairly confident that fantastic ongoing experiences like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 or Euro Truck Simulator 2, or if we want to go deeper into the simulation rabbit hole, iRacing, DCS World, X-Plane, and many, many more, simply live outside of these jurors’ knowledge, or they’re barely present at the edge of their consciousness, overshadowed by the usual AAA fare, indie darlings, and trashy drama that make Google happy.
I can’t really think of any other theory that can explain both the lack of coverage and the lack of recognition in award shows at the same time.
This is especially disheartening because I know full well just how hard the developers of our favorite simulators work. Not only do they have to create fun games, but they also have to keep them realistic, while satisfying some of the most demanding, involved, and sophisticated communities in gaming.
And yet, their efforts are ignored by those who claim to celebrate the best in the gaming industry. And that’s really a shame.
If you’d like to read more about flight simulation, you can find plenty in our latest roundup article from yesterday.
If you want to watch the full flight from Tokyo Haneda to Kitakyushu in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 that we used as the background of the video above, you can watch it below. As usual, leaving a like and a comment and subscribing to our growing YouTube channel is extremely helpful.
