On December 12, 2024, Astro Bot was crowned Game of the Year at the tenth annual Game Awards. Sony’s platformer beat out Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Balatro, Black Myth Wukong, and – controversially – Elden Ring‘s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC for the honor.
There are certain corners of the internet – namely X (formerly Twitter) – that would have you think Astro Bot’s acclamations are a harbinger of disaster. The Game Awards were over a week ago, but new posts on the issue keep popping up. Most of these social media outcries favor Black Myth Wukong instead, saying it’s “crazy” that Astro Bot could win over Black Myth‘s battle system. Others are just … bizarre.
Both Black Myth and Astro Bot are high-fidelity, deeply detailed games that make full use of the PS5’s capabilities. But among the naysayers, there seems to be some belief that Astro Bot’s bright, cheery atmosphere is somehow “lesser” than the darkness and grittiness of Black Myth Wukong or Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. The underlying attitude feels like a manifestation of the argument about animation you hear from people who don’t bother to engage with the medium: it must be “kid’s stuff,” so it’s not serious, and therefore, it’s somehow a lower form of art.
Simply put: if making a platformer that could hold a candle to Mario were easy, PlayStation would have accomplished it earlier in its thirty-year history. Just because something is cheerful and cute doesn’t make it any less of a technological feat than a game that is gritty and super difficult. Not everyone who likes Black Myth is going to like Astro Bot – they’re ridiculously different games. But that doesn’t mean that the wonders of Astro Bot deserve to be downplayed.
Astro Bot deserves Game of the Year, hundreds of times over.
Earlier this year, Sony released Concord, a shooter that it hoped would compete with Fortnite, whose tone felt torn out of the Guardians of the Galaxy pitch bible. The game was a massive flop, so much so that Sony removed it from storefronts and issued refunds back to players.
Concord had a seven-year development cycle at a studio with around 200 employees and probably cost several million to make. Astro Bot, on the other hand, took three years to make at a studio with only about 65 employees – employees who have been working together for years at this studio. These employees would regularly get together and – gasp! – play the game through its development.
In a time where there’s massive layoffs in the game industry and the biggest studios are scratching their heads over how AAA games can be profitable with such bloated, multi-million dollar development budgets, Astro Bot offers a sustainable answer. Keep teams together. Maybe they make smaller games over smaller development cycles.
But most importantly, Astro Bot‘s Team Asobi never lost sight of two simple truths: they love games, and they want games to be fun. Astro Bot, poetically enough, is the exact embodiment of the ideal future of games that Larian CEO Swen Vincke described in his speech before giving out Game of the Year.
“A studio makes a game that they wanted to play themselves,” Vincke said. “They didn’t make it to increase market share. They didn’t make it to serve as a brand. They didn’t have to meet arbitrary sales targets or fear being laid off if they didn’t meet those targets… They didn’t treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet. They didn’t treat their players as users to exploit… They knew that if you put the game – and the team – first, the revenue will follow.”
Astro Bot embodies that future perfectly. Team Asobi deserves Game of the Year for creating something so wonderful while not succumbing to the darker trends of the gaming industry. ANd it doesn’t hurt that Astro Bot is, simply put, a wonder of a game.
