I was recently reading an article about the 2025 Game Awards nominations and it made me wonder, in the world of video game development and publishing, do game awards actually matter or make a difference? in Hollywood it seems like a big thing for an actor to have “academy award winner” attached to their resume and its often used when promoting a new movie they are starring in. do game award nominations and winnings have a tangible benefit to publishers or dev studios? and if so what are they?

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Winning awards can help bring notoriety to a title and help it stand out more, but this also significantly varies with the title, franchise, and awareness of the title to begin with. The biggest problem any product has is the problem of discovery - potential customers can't buy a product they don't know exists. Well-known established franchises like GTA, Pokemon, Call of Duty, or FIFA winning awards isn't as important to the numbers as a relative less known new IP like Where Winds Meet or Dispatch.

When it comes to marketing and product awareness, there are three main categories - Owned media, Paid media, and Earned media. Advertising for Halo on Xbox Live is Microsoft utilizing Owned media - the owner of the product is using their own resources to generate awareness. Advertising for Halo on IGN is Paid media - the owner of the product is paying another party to generate awareness of the product. Fans making Halo fan content like reviews or machinima is Earned media - external awareness of the product produced by others at no cost to the product owner. These originate organically from outside the company and result from content quality and relevancy.

Winning awards falls into the Earned media category and can bring awareness of products to larger groups that haven't yet heard of them. For smaller projects that can't afford much Paid media and don't have a lot of Owned media to utilize, Earned media is what they all hope for to get product awareness. Any kind of virality - award wins, social media memes, word of mouth, influencer clips - can catapult a lesser-known product into the spotlight. Thus, an award win can be much more valuable and important to a lesser known title than it can to a well-known title, and even less to an industry juggernaut like Minecraft or Fortnite.

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