Game of the Year Edition (Concept)

A Game of the Year Edition is any video game that has been repackaged and advertised as having earned either one or many Game of the Year awards from any number of recognized publications or websites, often times with a discounted price and additional content.

Summary
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Overview

When a game is released as a Game of the Year, or GOTY Edition, it will often have some extra content. Fallout 3's GOTY includes all of the Downloadable Content (DLC) that was released after Fallout 3 hit store shelves. The same goes for Gears of War 2. Its Game of the Year Edition included all of its post-release DLC, including the the map packs and bonus levels.

However not all games have DLC. Most of the GOTY Editions are simply re-releases of the original game. Usually this is due to overwhelming positive reception a particular game received during the year prior. The games will often preform better in the marketplace than their initial releases, as GOTY Edition has become a sort of code for "Better Value Edition". For example, if someone has gotten rid of a game for whatever reason, or hasn't played it at all to begin with they might be tempted to buy the GOTY Edition if the perception is that it's a great game with free bonus content.

GOTY Editions are also beneficial for the developers, since not everyone has the ability and/or awareness to purchase and/or download DLC. If developers can manage to get their post-release content back onto a disc and into stores, they get their content played by people who would otherwise be unable to do so.

Additionally, simply having a new version labelled "Game of the Year" may be enough to convince people on the fence about a game to pick it up, so because there is no actual rule or law about what publishers call their re-releases, it isn't entirely unheard of for games that were never actually named "Game of the Year" by any publication or website to release a Game of the Year Edition. Such cases include Worms Reloaded, Two Worlds, L.A. Noire, and Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns.

Note: The dates shown on this page are refer to the original release date and not for the Game of the year re-release. Because of the way Whisky Media's servers work, we are unable to display the re-released dates on this page without making an entire new page for the GOTY edition.