 Look, Breath of the Wild is dominating Game of the Year awards this year. I don't think I'm even getting ahead of myself here when I say it has more than likely a shot to be Game of the Year at the Game Awards hosted by Jeff Kealy on December 7th. For Nintendo, this feels like a big win, as this gives them a ton of bragging rights. However, at a time of the year when Game Awards, not just Game of the Year, start to get handed out by fans, media, and everything in between. The same question seems to come to the forefront, and several outlets just refuse to actually address it. Do video game awards actually matter? It's a loaded question to be sure. Not because it's controversial, regardless of your stance on the answer, but because the answer can be both a yes and no for the same person, depending on what regards we are talking about. What's the context behind that question? As an example, do Game Awards actually make the games getting those awards better? Hardly. They don't impact games at all in that way, and as such, they really don't make a big difference on the medium of just playing video games. On the other hand, when talking about if Game Awards matter in the sense of giving developers credit for the work they do beyond some sales figures and favorable reviews, then I think most of us would say absolutely. Not that getting a game award actually makes a person's career for them, but that most of us probably feel that it is a wholly positive thing to give credit to game creators whose products we genuinely enjoy. Without Game Awards, we basically may not hear much about the actual developers on the games unless you personally choose to dig way more into it than most gamers will. Most of us skip right past the rolling credits when we beat a game, or we don't get to those credits at all, or if we do, we just skip it. We typically don't read most of the names there. Game Awards give a chance for those people to take some personal pride in their work, being recognized by fans and media as being special. On that front, I think most of us can agree that Game Awards matter. This is why asking the question of if video game awards truly matter isn't so cut and dry, because there's a lot of layers to game awards that are sometimes ignored when they shouldn't be. For some people, game awards matter on a personal level, because they further justify a purchasing decision, the same way a positive meta critic score can. To others, all this does is inflame fan wars and flaming, and I've seen small tinges of this with folks who feel that Super Mario Odyssey should be beating Breath of the Wild. It sparks heated debates that don't always stay friendly, and it typically gets worse when you cross console barriers. Nier fans, Horizon Zero Dawn fans, mix them into the debate, and you spearhead a conversation that can be wholly toxic as everyone declares any game that isn't their personal pick, garbage in comparison. I can't tell you how many times I've seen Breath of the Wild fans talk about how revolutionary the game is for the entire video game industry. Be it pumping up the world building, the physics, the AI, the story, the combat, or any number of factors that to them make Breath of the Wild such a special game. Breath of the Wild is, after all, my personal pick for Game of the Year if I had one, but when those who oppose that ideal hear those words, they quickly begin to dissect it. Is Breath of the Wild really revolutionary for the gaming industry, or is it just for the Zelda series? Cooking? Other games do that. Breakable weapons? Other games do that. Crafting? Same thing. Have you heard of Assassin's Creed? Speaking of Assassin's Creed, I actually saw someone argue that Breath of the Wild fixed the tower issue Assassin's Creed suffers from. As a huge fan of both series, I actually struggle to see how that's the case at all. The problem is that it's become stale in the Assassin's Creed series, more than anything else. It felt fresh in Assassin's Creed 2, but today in 2017 it feels like a tired idea. But here's the thing, it's new to Zelda. So again, it felt fresh. But it's really not. In comparing the tower ideal between the two series, Breath of the Wild didn't actually fix or change much of anything. They straight up just copied the idea into their game. And the game got praised for it. And that's honestly the biggest thing you see crop up, and the negative when talking about game awards. It leads to fans needlessly cross comparing games even more like I just did after already doing that same thing all year long. No matter what game wins what awards, millions are going to be upset. And the fan wars are going to start anew all over again. Over awards that don't actually impact your experience with the game in the first place, nor do they actually make a difference in your life. Is Breath of the Wild revolutionary or is it just combining ideas and things basically the rest of the industry has been doing for decades into a neat bow? Why are we even asking that question? Because that's the debate that crops up eight months later when people start to question if X game deserves Game of the Year. So to answer the initial question, do video game awards matter? Honestly, I'm not sure there is a correct answer in the slightest. I think it's up to the individual to decide for themselves, and not because their preferred games won, but rather because of the value those awards may represent to them. For developers, I can see these awards absolutely mattering. For fans, I can see them mattering too, but I can also see them not mattering at all. Of course, for the purpose of the game awards ran by Jeff Keely, it can be argued that muddles the question even more. Because he kind of props up it as an event, a celebration of gaming from that year. And honestly, when you view it like that, it's hard to be negative about it. But is the event what makes it so exciting, or the act of actually giving games an award? I don't know. What I do know is, video game awards aren't going anywhere, and that personally, I will continue to pay attention to a select handful of them, because I find the entire conversation around them to be wholly positive, even when that conversation turns into a cesspool, as it often does in the world of the internet. Let me know what you think about all of this in the comments below. I am Nathaniel Ruffeljantz from Nintendo Prime, and if you like this video, you know what to do, and if you dislike this video, hit that dislike button. Subscribe for more content, and I will catch you in the next one.