There’s No Conspiracy For GTA VI To Be In The Game Awards

There was a small but breathless news cycle yesterday around the fact that GTA VIwill make the cutoff to be eligible for The Game Awards, which to me mostly served as a reminder that, oh right, the ever-lengthening showcase has trophies attached. The fact raised suspicion that the unstoppable hype force of GTAhad somehow altered the immovable hype object of The Game Awards, but the truth is less exciting, if not more depressing: This is just how The Game Awards work.

The cutoff to be nominated for this year’s Game Awards is November 20, putting GTA VI’s November 19 release date right against the wire. This certainly feelssuspicious; how could a game that’s only been out for a day be nominated for gaming’s self-declared highest honor? But workers at multiple voting outlets tell Aftermath that the deadline for eligible games to provide code to voters is October 30th, meaning voters would have some hands-on time with GTA VIin advance of the deadline.

As The Game Awards FAQ notes, any and every game can be eligible, and

At the start of the Awards Season, game publishers and developers are provided with access to a list of outlets that will submit nomination ballots. While most of our voting outlets have access to games through the normal editorial process, publishers and developers are permitted to provide review copies or digital redemption codes. 

This doesn’t mean Rockstar willsend that code, which ties into another minor bit of frenzy that occurred this week, regarding a leaker claiming GTA VIreview codes will go out before the end of October. But if true, that would give outlets plenty of time (or what passes for “plenty” on game review timelines) before GTA VI’s release date andthe TGA cutoff. While from my experience three weeks ahead of release could read as ambitious–for comparison, Kotaku had two weeks with Red Dead Redemption 2–I’m not sure where the idea that Rockstar wouldn’t send out GTA VIpre-release code came from.

That said, Game File pointed out over the summer the unusual-for-Rockstar fact that the game hasn’t had any previews, unlike RDR2and GTA V.Plus, the company has battened down the hatches since VI’s 2022 leak, particularly around remote work. All of this couldsuggest Rockstar might be extra leery of the game getting into anyone’s hands ahead of launch, but even then it’s hard for me to imagine the company being so anxious about things as to forego reviews or awards. But at this point it’s just best to accept that nothing surrounding the year’s most hyped, most load-bearing game can be normal. 

While there was speculation that this year’s Game Awards eligibility date was chosen specifically to get GTAin there, previous years’ eligibility deadlines have all fallen in the November 17-22nd range. And while it at first struck me as weird that nominees are frequently announced before the eligibility cutoff, this is also standard: For example, 2025’s nominees were announced November 17, when the cutoff was November 21, and 2024’s nominees were announced November 18, when the cutoff was November 22.

So, yeah: This is how The Game Awards work! Whether that’s a goodthing is another question entirely, particularly where GTA VIis concerned. The game has been sucking the air out of the room for years, and many people predict it will sweep the accolades of Geoff Keighley’s annual showcase based on the mere fact of its existence. While voting outlets might get code ahead of time, it could be unlikely that multiple people at an outlet could have the chance to spend much time with it, especially when it comes to a game as sizable as GTA VI, and when the number of pre-release codes sent to outlets for any game is traditionally limited. So it will be hard to say whether GTA VI’s inevitable nominations represent the true group opinion of an outlet, or just everyone taking one reviewer’s word for it.

And of course the conversation around this is predicated on the idea that the awardsat The Game Awards–you know, those short segments sandwiched between ads and “world premiere”s–are meaningful to begin with. While I don’t want to diminish any value Keighley’s winged trophy might have to the developers who get to lug it home in their carry-on bags, the part of the award show where people get awards has long played second fiddle to the featureless hype the event feels designed to both generate and celebrate, the same enthusiasm machine that’s put GTA VIin the spotlight in the first place. Outlets might horse race award predictions and dissect the show’s outcome to capture some of that ever-diminishing SEO juice, but the awards aren’t what viewers tune in for, or even what it feels like the show truly exists for at all.   

Is any of this sensible, or fair, or a true litmus test of the year’s best games? Of course not. The Game Awards voting is a mix of global outlets and player input, a setup that feels engineered to output general consensus. And the general consensus is alreadythat GTA VIis the game of the year, if not the decade, based on little more than trailers, leaks, nostalgia, and hype. There doesn’t need to be some big conspiracy; the truth says enough.