Next Grand Theft Auto 6Turning to 2026, last week of Prime Minister Nintendo Switch 2 will probably become a game event in 2025. Mario Kart WorldAmbitious continuation of one of the best -selling games of all time with perhaps the most respected game studio in the world: Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development (to give nintendo’s development area full title).
You might think that such a successful title would be almost a claimant to play in Game of the Year on Game Awards in December. Not at all. Mario Kart World He inflicted well with critics, if not so well with his predecessor or other 2025 games. But the fact is that even if he had a metacritic assessment of 96, withdrawing all his competition, he would still not be a reliable contender and he would probably not even be nominated. This is because it is a racing game.
Earlier I discussed the prejudice of the Game Awards jury: the compact version is that the adventures of the action and roles games are strongly privileged, especially if they focus on history. Sports games, SIM, strategy, fights and races are pure with happiness. It does not matter how good they are and how many reviewers they loved – they will not be nominated in the Goths category. It never happened.
When it comes to racing games, there are two cases that constitute a decisive precedent for their status as absolute deficiencies in the Game of the Year competition.
The first is, accordingly, respectively, Mario Map 8Commonly considered a perfect expression of this very popular series. His original incarnation of Wii U was published in 2014, the first year of the Game awards. He made a review well, with an assessment of 88 on both metacritic and opencritic – not as high as some of these years as Bayonetta 2 AND Dark Souls 2But at least on a par with the final winner, Dragon Age: Inquisition. He won both the best family and the best categories of sports/racing games, but was not nominated for Game of the Year. (There was no other Nintendo game this year, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U/3DSWhich he did Keep 92 Metascore, better than in any nominated game.)
An even more condemning example is Forza Horizon 5. It was one of the best rated games from 2021, if not the best. And it was a fairly gentle year for recent editions, which caused one of the weakest fields of the game in the history of Game Awards and a surprise for the cooperation of Hazelight, It requires two. Forza Horizon 5As the only game in the competition with over 90 Meascore, she should have brought her. But it wasn’t even nominated again.
Sealing Mario Kart WorldFate is the fact that he is not there Forza Horizon 5Class, critically speaking. Reviews appeared gradually – early access to pressing was not provided – but now they settled at 87 on Metacritic and 86 on OpenCritic. Reviewers (like me) admire this, but they have some criticism of the implementation of the open world in the game that changes the recent page of Mario Kart.
Nintendo little hope to repeat his triumph in the year of the release of the Switch with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Now he rests with Donkey Kong Banana Maybe Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. If it turns out well or can get a nomination; Last year the winner Astro bot opened the door of the Goths for family platform games, and Metroid was previously nominated (Metroid fear in 2021).
But Mario Kart WorldThe chances of nomination or victory of Goths were zero before anyone played. The strange blindness of the Gothic jury genre sees. It can be argued that species such as racing games are too niche to be considered, or at least too niche, so that it can be widely played in the large jury of Game Awards. But Mario Kart 8 Deluxe68 million sales put this lie; Everyone is playing Mario Kart.
Instead, the uncomfortable truth is that the critical video game community, whose jury Game Awards is a fairly wide sample, does not consider racing games – neither martial games, sim or the rest – is capable of the size or real representation of art. It is certainly an assumption that is worth challenging.
