It’s 2025. I’ve been watching the Video Game Awards (VGA) since the beginning, man. 2014 is when the great prophet Geoff Keighley first took to the stage and delivered unto us hours of cinematic commercials, inexplicable, live music performances, and embarrassing product placements.

The Video Game Awards have been better. They’ve certainly been worse. But I don’t know if they’ve ever been this boring. I’m left in a slight existential crisis. 2025 heads to a close with just one more reminder of how little there is to look forward to in this chaotic era of world history.

It’s no exaggeration to say the VGAs have been among my favorite events of the year. I truly love gathering with friends and watching the latest onslaught of cynicism in another industry having its bones picked clean by late-stage Capitalists. We’d mock all the awful industry trends, cringeworthy failures at reading the room and understanding gaming culture, and if we were lucky, we might see a cool new reveal or two. At the very least, we could occasionally enjoy the sincere, wonderful artists who’ve brought us these games’ attempt to navigate this bloated corpse they’ve been forced to shelter inside of.

This year, it felt like what little oxygen existed in the Video Game Awards had leaked out. The energy just wasn’t there. When Miss Piggy walked up to flirt with Geoff Keighley, it was hard to tell which of them wasn’t a Muppet. In multiple skits, “invisible” wire connected to the performers was so blatant that I genuinely thought the next game would be a satire on corporate puppetry.

The artifice of the VGAs has never been a secret. It was never a serious celebration of gaming as an artistic medium. The awards were always just something to hang commercials on while the industry drove its own hype and manufactured gaming’s cultural narrative.

How obvious it’s been has varied: excessive movie trailers and other deference to the film industry over video games, award categories and choices that objectively make no sense, awards deemed “unimportant” and rushed through to make more space for Doritos and shaving ads, xenophobic levels of disinterest in non-Western games, and insincere sentimental garbage about gaming bringing people together followed by telling video game creators to shut the fuck up and get off the stage.

It’s a joke, and it always has been. An award show for video games is not a doomed premise. But step one is the producers proving they love video games, and they’ve failed to reach that year after year.

What’s nice about jokes, though, is that they at least make you laugh. Tragedy and absurdity are partners in rhyme. And as stated, sometimes the genuine artists the show is purportedly for graciously provide the ceremonies something of value worth showing.

What good is a joke that doesn’t even make you laugh? What are you left with when even surprises are unsurprising? When cynicism feels like the worst kind of paradigm, occasionally you’re reminded of just how awful it is to feel nothing at all.

To be fair, it’s not entirely the fault of the VGAs. At least, I don’t think it is. The world is in an extremely horrible place right now with unprecedented, escalating levels of wealth inequality, disinformation, cruelty, and general inhumanity. Jobs in the United States are rapidly disappearing. People are becoming homeless and losing healthcare, and the only thing the immediate future promises is an absolute certainty that we haven’t seen the true nadir of death, decay, and apocalyptic greed.

In this environment, to be asked to get excited for a dozen new reveals of space marines shooting at zombies feels… worse, somehow. To see artists get snubbed when just yesterday you heard another story about record layoffs seems… crueler. Mediocrity was something you could mock and then turn away from, but the thought mediocrity may someday be all we have has this corporate runway show carry a downright antagonistic vibe towards the arts and those who partake in them.

“That’s all you’ve got?” is notably better than “the world is bleeding, and that’s all you’ve got?”

I dunno. I just think I might be losing my patience for the facade. The VGAs aren’t single-handedly responsible for ruining the world, but it’s propped up by businesses directly involved in doing so, all the while pretending it’s “for us.” That’s… not fun anymore. Has the joke gotten stale? Or is the joke simply no longer funny, because the topic is too serious?

We should care, I think. Culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When more and more people are living off of public food pantries, what difference does any video game coming out make? A new Nintendo Switch 2 game? Who can afford a Nintendo Switch 2 in the first place? What’s the success metric for an indie developer if grocery stores are going to secretly raise their prices to match any windfall?

People make video games. If people don’t have a future, then video games don’t have a future. Everything’s being bled dry, and the 2025 VGAs inspired anxiety that the game industry’s blood flow might see itself cut off, set to crumble just like everything else in the world that’s falling victim to infinite wealth abstraction—without the abstracted having infinite wealth.

Hopefully, a year from now, this article will come across as a paranoid, laughably pessimistic relic of a turbulent time. But I’m not sure. I feel gross. This whole thing feels wrong. The Video Game Awards have always felt wrong, but they’ve never felt this empty and this bad.

…I miss Schick Hydrobot.

Control 2 looks good. As does Phantom Blade Zero. Mega Man: Dual Override being slated for 2027 is insane. Congratulations to Ace Combat fans. Where is Onimusha? Entirely FMV “cinematic” video game trailers should probably be outlawed, or at least treated with enough utter contempt as to be made commercially unviable. Was everything AI generated? Who knows!!!

Goodnight.

See you next year.

Maybe.