Every December, Geoff Keighley puts onThe Game Awards, an opportunity to celebrate the best experiences the industry has produced in the last 12 months. A voting jury comprised of outlets from around the globe comes together to nominate games in a variety of categories, and the winners are announced live in front of millions of fans.
As is par for the course with award shows, the nominees can cause controversy, and seemingly deserving titles may not receive even a single nod. Such is the case with these eight games, whose absence from the 2024 show left us scratching our heads.
All games on this list were released or made available to the public before June 25, 2025, per The Game Awards eligibility rules.
Steamworld Heist 2 arrives almost a decade after its predecessor, delivering more turn-based strategy gameplay in Image & Form’s creative universe. The game loop is broken up into encounters, where players must assemble the right squad of characters, weapons, and items in order to survive enemy waves and steal treasure.
It also managed to iterate on the previous entry, introducing an explorable world map hiding secrets for players to discover. This blend of tried-and-true strategy with new ideas resonated with critics, resulting in a wave of positive scores. Sadly, the Steamworld franchise isn’t the most well-known, likely being the reason it was neglected this awards season.
Few developers attempt to make platform fighters and compete with Super Smash Bros., and even fewer are able to foster healthy communities around their games. With that in mind, Aether Studios has a lot to be proud of, as their sequel to 2017’s Rivals of Aether is championed by Smash’s notoriously fickle fanbase.
Rivals 2 offers Smash players the best of both worlds. The hardcore mechanics of a game like Melee are present, with additional techniques like parrying available as well. However, Aether Studios also wanted to expand on the original’s single-player offerings, with additional content for casual players promised post-launch. Rivals of Aether 2 represents a niche of an already small fighting game community, but it’s disappointing to see it get passed up for nomination.
Oftentimes, horror is created not with explicit visuals, but with sound. Audio can suggest ideas to our brains that are much scarier than what may actually be happening, such as mistaking a creaking pipe for a monster lurking in the dark. This is a concept that the devs at The Chinese Room implemented masterfully in Still Wakes the Deep.
Throughout the game, you explore an oil rig that has been attacked by a mysterious presence. As it begins stalking you, you’ll hear the creature roaming the surrounding environment, and often you need to use that sound to know when to hide during stealth sections. Still Wakes the Deep didn’t receive as much fanfare as bigger titles, but it would have been nice to see The Chinese Room recognized for its excellent work.
Despite all the praise heaped on HD-2D presentation by both critics and fans alike, Square Enix has no Game Awards to show for it. The art style was first introduced with 2018’s Octopath Traveler, which was nominated for Best Art Direction, but ultimately lost to Return of the Obra Dinn. Since then, no HD-2D game has been given a nod for the award, which is unfortunate, because the Dragon Quest 3 Remake may be its best implementation yet.
Whereas Octopath was drenched in a rather aggressive sepia tone, Dragon Quest 3 Remake is flush with color, showing off just how varied the art style can be. The contrast between the old-school pixel art and the advanced lighting techniques creates something wholly original, an ode to the past that also maintains a modern presentation. We can only hope that future HD-2D games receive the recognition they deserve at The Game Awards.
When Palworld launched in January 2024, it took the world by storm, largely due to its wacky premise and meme potential. Like Pokemon, players can traverse a vast world and capture a wide variety of cute creatures, each with their own abilities. However, you can also give them realistic firearms to fight alongside you, or make them work in bases to generate resources.
Palworld was a smash hit commercial success, capitalizing on the popularity of survival games and Game Freak’s lack of competition in the monster-catching genre. It feels odd for such a massive moment in the year to be completely neglected by The Game Awards, especially when it comes to celebrating smaller studios like Pocketpair.
College football is a huge deal in America. When EA stopped its NCAA franchise due to litigation from the sport’s governing board, many fans simply stopped playing football games. College Football 25’s success shows how large an appeal the sport has for gamers, buying it up in droves and making it one of the best-selling games of the year.
While The Game Awards are voted on by an international committee, College Football not even earning a nomination is surprising. EA Orlando was praised for its gameplay innovations, revamping passing controls and giving each player a health system. Single-player content was also a priority, with the return of Dynasty mode being a particular highlight. There’s always a chance future games in the series are nominated, but it’s frustrating to see one of the best football games in years ignored.
In recent times, Final Fantasy’s dominance within the JRPG genre has been challenged by Persona. Following the release of Persona 5, the series has exploded in popularity, thanks in large part to Atlus’s willingness to release their games on non-Sony hardware. After garnering so many new fans, the decision was made to reach back into the past and revisit one of the best games in the series, Persona 3.
Many of Persona’s new converts wouldn’t be familiar with the third entry, as it originally launched in the mid-2000s. Reload takes the classic and remakes it, bringing the game in line with modern standards and quality-of-life improvements. It reviewed exceptionally well with an 87 OpenCritic score, but was likely passed up for consideration in key categories due to the release of Atlus’s even more successful RPG smash, Metaphor: ReFantazio (93 on OpenCritic).
Hades 2 may seem like an odd choice for nomination at first, given that it has not been officially released yet. However, The Game Awards do allow early access titles to be considered, so Supergiant’s sequel was eligible this year. Given the game’s quality and the studio’s pedigree, it seems like an unfortunate omission from 2024’s ceremony.
The first Hades won Best Action Game in 2020, and many players believe its follow-up to be of similar quality. You play as Melinoë, Zagreus’s sister, while she tries to vanquish Chronos. The combat is similar to its predecessor, with dungeon-crawling being the focus as you acquire new powers. There is still hope that The Game Awards recognize Hades 2 in the future, likely when it exits early access and debuts on consoles.
