It’s “Game Over” for The Game Awards. Wait, sorry; I meant to say it’s “Game Over” for The Game Awards’ more obscure and far less secure distant cousin, The Real Game Awards.
Founded in early 2024 by ScrewAttack co-founder and Side Scrollers podcast host Craig Kristimas, The Real Game Awards never shied away from provocation. Arguing that gaming’s biggest awards show had been taken over by the industry’s biggest corporations and no longer represented gamers’ honest opinions, The Real Game Awards presented itself as a more authentic alternative created by gamers and for gamers.
While the show fancied itself a rebellion against corporate overreach, a closer look at its 2024 and 2025 award shows reveals a very different picture. A proud confederate of GamerGate and other “anti-woke” gaming groups, The True Game Awards was anything but objective in its ranking.
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With such innovative award categories as “Biggest Letdown,” “Best Cashgrab,” and “Best Jiggle Physics,” The True Game Awards was less a celebration and more a mean-spirited roast. Spiteful jokes about “woke” developers and “sellout” players fill out most of the show’s runtime, leaving next-to-no room for actual nuanced analysis. Even the award-winning games weren’t safe from the occasional jab, leaving one to wonder if the hosts actually liked them.
It doesn’t help that the show was funded through an exceptionally sleazy subscription model. These memberships could get pretty expensive (the highest is a jaw-dropping $1,337 a year), and the rewards were pretty lackluster. The fact that the show spent its subscribers’ hard-earned money on expenses like a cringe-inducing AI-generated animated intro didn’t help the sour medicine go down, either.
With all that in mind, it’s no surprise that, after only two years, the curtains are coming down on this show. In a post on the True Game Awards’ social media page, the hosts announced they were retiring the project with their usual grace and candor, dedicating an entire paragraph of their farewell message to insulting their critics.
“We showed you that you can celebrate great games and still poke fun at stupidity. Turns out people can still get mad at you for handing out trophies to good games based on what they think you believe. Gaming is very normal /s.”
In related news, The Game Awards 2026 will stream on Disney+. We’ve got some solid contenders for Game of the Year this year, and the competition is already pretty intense, so it’s sure to be a good show.
