What was your preferred GOTY 2020 content?

i still consume/enjoy all of it, and appreciate all the time and effort they put in! i will say- it is interesting to witness how the coverage and discussions appear to be changing over time. as time marches on and their personal circumstances change, it feels like a lot of the GB staff play less of the same things- whether that's due to less gaming time generally, tastes refining, or the quantity of games increasing.

i think the end result is the top 10 (to me) ends up feeling like less of a consensus list and more of a series of carve-outs for individuals or duos that the group can live with- and that's fine! it's just different.

I think the list is much more interesting when it's the games that people are the most passionate about. Focusing on consensus is what leads you down the path of naming something like Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor as the GOTY.

Once the goofy skits from the earlier days went away, my favorite part of GB's GOTY stuff were the daily video recaps & text posts of categories and winners and runners up from the deliberations and podcasts. Real bummed to see those gone (maybe I just can't find them?) as I personally don't like to listen to hours and hours of discussion with spoilers strewn about, but still very curious to see what was picked!

If they are really gone and not just hidden to me, did anyone here in the forums do their own summary for those this time? I've looked and can't find anything there, either.

This year more than other I didn't play or watch many games. Most of the discussion this year were over my head, so I found it hard to engage with any passion about what was picked. I, of course, feel Daddy of the Year should have gone to Jeff. ;-)

I always love listening to the GOTY podcasts, but I gotta say, after reading the guest and especially the staff list articles it made me realize how much I miss some of the written content that's been absent on this site. I know it doesn't do the numbers from a business standpoint, but man do I need more writing from Alex, Brad, Jeff etc.. in my life. I really appreciated when the articles covered more personal topics.

I think the videos and the guests lists were both great. I've always thought these GOTY discussions really forced the kind of conversations I'd like to see more of. When somebody has to defend something they really care about, it forces them to speak of it in more analytical and impassioned terms, which is a lot more interesting than your average game discussions! The guest lists are great too, because it gives some folks with different perspectives an outlet. I like how no two lists are really even the same format.

I will say, seeing chat made it a worse experience this year. My mistake for having it open, I guess. But it felt like watching the Super Bowl in a room full of people who bet their retirement savings on opposing teams. I don't know how many ways the staff has to reiterate that these lists are personal and representative of their experiences, but you can still like whatever your favorite game is if it didn't make their lists.

The deliberation podcasts are the thing that first impressed be about Giant Bomb when I started listening over a decade ago. They've become and annual tradition that I look forward to every year. It's such a great counter into to the wider internet's take on any publication's "top 10" lists for whatever. There's no objective number one, it's just what a specific group of people dig.

I like rooting for my favorites and hearing impassioned arguments for games I haven't yet played. Getting spoiled is a bummer, but I listen anyway and hope I forget most of it by the time I get around to playing.

They lists are great, I'm always impressed with the guests that participate. I don't necessarily get around to reading all of them.

yeah- i think i agree- although i do question the necessity of an enumerated list if there is a shift towards personal favorites vs. group decision-making. i've said it in other discussions in and around the site, but sometimes i toy with the notion of GB switching to a format where individual staff pick a game or two and champion them as stand-alone arguments as opposed to an enumerated, oppositional list. kinda like what they used to do with their old GotY features-because i would love for alex to show of a piece of KRZ he found meaningful, or Ben to demonstrate the bits of Hades he found compelling. i feel like a lot of the interesting positive discussion loses out to arguments of game-position-on-list (ie "does this game hang") and sometimes i walk away not knowing why they feel so strongly about a particular game.

but generally i'd agree- i'll take passion over compromise any day of the week.

I think we have to agree that the circumstances surrounding this year's GOTY was unprecedented and a best case scenario. There were a ton of guest lists and there were not a ton of options on the table beyond what they provided, and I think what the site shared was very good.

I enjoy checking in on the guest lists, though I'll to say, like pyide, the skits were what I used to be most excited about in GOTY times. Few of the staff's tastes align much with mine, and, yeah, the concept of a consensus list isn't something that interests me much either.

I do like to scan the staff and guest top ten lists for game suggestions of titles I've never heard of or have forgotten about, but overall I've never cared much for any goty content other than video skits and fun stuff.

Took at pass on it this year, after being frustrated with the direction it was going for years and years now, and it was a good choice.

You have basically summed up my feelings exactly. I try to listen to the actual goty content but its more as background noise while I do something else.

I did the best with Day 5, and both the guest and staff lists. The staff lists in fact mean as much, or perhaps more than the big top ten list. I don't want to say I miss the old days, but please toss me some near violent Sucks to be the Worst game, and not some pithy also rans. I really didn't enjoy (or say, want to enjoy) the near (Neir) arguments in the old days. That looked more like personality clash. But I did value what they were wanting to be instead, developed and semi intense discussion. And Day 5 achieved enough of that. The staffs hearts seemed in it. You could picked up someone's passion for a game, and another's sense of fair play/judgement to put theirs aside.

The guest lists were great, with one an outstanding critique of Kentucky Route 0 wrapped around the fates of two valued pets. Lots of interesting points of view in the others. And of course the staff lists to see where converged and diverged on their rankings and why.

Every year is it's own thing. Hopefully This whole thing can expand out again. No problem, really like this site.

Overall I thought this was a good GOTY.

The GOTY podcasts has been a ritual for the past seven years or so, and I have used previous deliberations in the past for stuff like road trips. I have a vivid memory of finishing up the 2011 GOTY discussion as I was driving across the country. It is a hard sell to listen to 3+ hour long podcasts for five days in a row (if you were trying to listen to them as they went along), but that is still my favorite GOTY content. The past few years were not my favorite--I recall 2017 getting heated more than usual, and I did not care for the 2018 and 2019 recap. This year felt like a return to form, even with everybody being remote. It was good focusing on just the awards again and to go back to 10 categories. The days of having 16-20 categories are probably gone now, unless they bring back frivolous things like "Best Sky Game", but there were still a lot of good discussions with the topics we had. In comparison, 2019 felt like a 15 hour long Bombcast, and then a few hours of some kind of generic categories, and then Outer Wilds winning it easily. This year felt like right balance of everything.

The skits were fun from what I've seen (at least the year gaming died and the year the studio closed had some fun bits), but I'm not really missing them either.

I do miss the group videos. There was so much good stuff from the Giant ROM stuff to Hitsmas to Mario Party Party 11. I had to look back over the Holiday Spectacular videos on the site, because I couldn't remember if there was anything. It looks like the only one was Giant Bomb Feud? I get not wanting to be working on this stuff for two weeks or dealing with living in hotels / away from your family during that time, but it felt like something was lacking. Even if there were separate East and West videos (like if Hitsmas was done by one studio) filmed after people went back home, that would have been nice.

The top 10 lists are nice, but there's also so many of them. I never have the time to read through all of the guest lists, let alone the community ones.

I miss out on a lot of GOTY podcasts because I haven't played a lot of thr games being discussed. I should really make a point of going back and listening to the older ones.

I gravitate more towards the written word as a general rule so I like the guest lists. Easy to skip past games I want to play and they're usually a fun reflection of the personality.

Mine are the “Holiday Spectacular” shows

I will say I miss the holiday specialtacular content. In particular I miss Hitsmas because that was always some of my favorite content of the whole year. Really hope they do something like that for Hitman 3 content.

I really don't play many video games, since I play FFXIV and that consumes most of my gaming time, and I'm not super interested in a lot of bigger games, but I love hearing people just talk about games. Podcasts are also a favorite of mine because I can be doing something else while I listen. I do miss the Holiday Specialtacular stuff, especially Hitsmas, but as we all know, 2020 was a thing and I wasn't really expecting anything like that this year.

I no longer give much shit about other people liking/not liking the things I like (especially since, most often, they don't like what I like). On top of that, I would like to avoid spoilers, since I usually don't play games the same year they release, so I just generally avoid GOTY content. The last time I listened to GOTY podcasts was 2017.

My fave GB GOTY content has always been the skits/group content that would come out at GOTY time, but obviously there wasn't any of that this year.

Will mirror this as well. The skits where some of the most amazing content GB has created. I also quite enjoyed when they used to play the top games they had picked.

I stopped caring what outlets put as their top 10's many years ago.

I do give the staff written lists a once over though.