From the Void Gaming Awards 2025
By Marc Eybert-GuillonLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur dignissim, lectus vitae rhoncus tincidunt, sapien urna aliquet quam, quis finibus leo mauris eget dolor. In in diam ut neque sodales auctor ornare at ex. Donec nec sem vel velit ultrices pellentesque.
EXCUSE OF THE YEAR
“It was just placeholder”
From The Alters to Expedition 33 and Anno 117, games have been getting great milage out of the placeholder excuse this year. AI art or text in your $50 product? It’s just placeholder! What is it doing in the final game, then? Look, considering placeholder assets are a new thing only introduced with the advent of generative AI, we have to cut these people some slack. They’re not used to having to replace placeholders, since those didn’t exist just a couple years ago.
Some might say these games fully intended for that content to be final or considered it “good enough” when the crunch hit and only claimed it to be placeholder when they were called out, but I’m not that cynical. Instead, I’d like to offer some alternative options: for placeholder art, maybe cut into the Game Awards trailer budget and use it to pay an artist to make some quick mockups, or use doodles or other assets that clearly don’t belong in your game so you don’t forget to replace them later on. For text, you could simply put some nonsense there, like, oh I don’t know… “Lorem ipsum, something something…” or you could come up with a quick bullshit approximation of what the final text is supposed to convey. That would require using your brain for a couple minutes, but it might be a good alternative to the plagiarism machine that burns a forest every time you use it.
Anyway, keep an eye out for AI slop. Who knows how many devs out there don’t realize they’ve left placeholders in their games and need you to point it out.
BEST AWARDS SHOW
The Expedition 33 awards
I hear Expedition 33 is a fantastic game and I don’t doubt it deserved many of its awards. I haven’t played it, cause I’m stuck in backlog Hell, but I’m sure I’ll have a great take on it by 2030. Anyway, this isn’t meant to cast any doubt on the game’s quality, but with E33 winning Best Indie and Best Indie Debut, there’s clearly something wrong with how the media and the Game Awards classify games.
It is undeniably great that a team of just 30 people with a budget (supposedly) under $10 million could create such a great product and outshine all bigger productions out there, but classifying it as indie is preposterous. 30 people (excluding outsourcing) isn’t huge, but it’s still a decent team, and $10 million is only equivalent to the average AAA CEO’s watch, yes, but it’s also much more money than 99% of actual indie devs will see in their lifetimes.
Can we remember what “indie” stands for? Independent. i.e. not published/funded by a third party. As a linguist, I like to remember that words carry meaning. For E33, Sandfall was backed by Kepler Interactive, a publisher with enough money to promote several games at the Game Awards at $1 million a pop. They also took care of E33’s voice acting expenses, which included the likes of Ben Starr, Charlie Cox and Andy Serkis.
It is plain stupid that this gets judged in the same category as games with a budget of “the dev’s free time” and a voice cast of “no one, cause that shit’s too expensive.” Insult to injury, E33 didn’t need the publicity. It was already a huge success and won a plethora of other awards, including Game of the Year. It didn’t need to also take home Best Indie and Best Indie Debut to get its deserved recognition. All it took was the spotlight from actual small productions. You might say “Who cares about TGA”, but the fact is that they’re our industry’s biggest public platform, hence the outragious pricing of its promo spots. My mom who’s played 1 game in her entire life has heard of the “Gaming Oscars” and E33’s sweep.
We badly need to canonize the AA category.
I’m aware E33 lost its Best Indie and Best Indie Debut awards as a result of the AI hiccup mentionned above, but the fact remains it initially won those and would have kept them if not for that AI controversy, and the new winners still lost on the publicity offered by the big stage.
BEST DISAPPEARING ACT
KRAFTON
This year, Krafton released InZOI, also known as “The Sims visit the uncanny valley”. After this so-called Sims-killer killed no more than its own hype once it became clear it was nothing more than a random patchwork of AI-generated slop, Krafton continued willingly stepping on rakes when it mired its only successfull franchise outside of PUBG, Subnautica, in endless controversy. According to the Unknown World founders, Krafton alledgedly delayed the game to 2026 to avoid paying UW a $250 million bonus they would have been owed if the game had released in 2025, a move Krafton’s CEO apparently brainstormed using ChatGPT. They then alledgedly used this delay as reason to fire the founders for “abandonning the game” and promptly took over Unknown Worlds. Krafton was sued by the UW founders as a response and recently walked back their claim that they fired them in light of the game’s state, seemingly because they could not produce proof of it.
Oh, and that’s before we even get to Krafton’s announcement that it has become an “AI-first” company, launching a company-wide voluntary resignation program.
I can’t wait to see what garbage they end up producing, but I’m mostly curious of who’s going to acquire them after they fail to make anything of value.
Any way, good riddance.
BEST DISPLAY OF LAZINESS
“Did I leave the prompt in?”
From The Alters’ "Sure, here's a revised version" and "Sure! The text translated to Brazilian Portuguese is:” to Crunchyroll’s “ChatGPT said:”, it’s hilarious to me that several cases of AI in media are so blatant these days as to leave part of the prompting in. What it is, other than funny, is a demonstration of what AI represents for these people: plain old laziness. A shortcut to a product, and in its wake, an erosion of care and attention to details. What does it say about you when you can’t even remove the proof that you can’t be bothered to write something yourself?
BEST EXPLOITATION OF STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
MICROSOFT
Since a few years back, Microsoft went on a tear spending billions acquiring studio after studio, including Ninja Theory, Compulsion, Obsidian, Double Fine, many more and most notably the monopoly nightmare acquisition of Activision Blizzard. What do they have to show for it, in 2025? Numerous studio closures (Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, The Initiative…), going third party after a string of failures and cancelations that continuously erroded Xbox’s standing as a first party platform, and most recently one of the worst-received Call of Duty games in the history of the franchise, with a significant dip in sales to match. Microsoft has failed on all fronts, and it’s all been felt by the workforce, of course, not Phil Spencer or Satya Nadella, who are still millionaires.
Beyond gaming, Microsoft’s products, like Google’s, have been getting worse and worse, a phenomenon in the tech industry known as “enshittification”. These companies have forgotten they’re supposed to make products and offer services people actually want and enjoy, and instead chase trends to satisfy investors and generate nebulous growth, all the while sabotaging user experience. I recommend this ColdFusion video for a deep dive into why Windows has become so bad. Yet, we’re all struggling to distance ourselves from companies like Microsoft or Google despite their products steadily becoming garbage. Why? Because they’ve been there for so long they’ve embedded into our lives. They own the market and make the rules. I’m typing this on a Windows PC connected to a Google account, even though I hate that everywhere I go, they try to push me to use Copilot and Gemini just because they’ve invested way too much money into Sam Altman’s wet dream. Not my problem, Satya.
And this goes even beyond games and enshittified products, it also involves Microsoft’s ties to the military and the Palestinian genocide. I recommend this People Make Games video on the topic.
BEST CRIMINAL
SAM ALTMAN (allegedly, not libel, don’t sue)
What has Sam Altman done?
Syphoned billions from many investors (Microsoft alone invested more than $13 billion in Open AI) for a pipe dream that has still not manifested anything of value, actively driving tech enshittification as companies try to justify their investments by replacing workers with AI and shoving slop we don’t want down our throats.
Built an industry on recycling copyrighted works without consent, even admitting this business model would not work if the rules applied to them (i.e. the basic rule of “You shall not steal”).
Sells a product that contributed to the death of Sophie Rottenberg.
Sells a product that contributed to the death of Margaux Whittemore.
Sells a product that contributed to the death of Alex Taylor.
Sells a product that contributed to the death of Adam Rayne.
Sells a product that contributed to the death of Zane Shamblin.
Sells a product that contributed to the death of Suzanne Adams.
Sells a product that contributed to the death of Amaury Lacey.
Sells a product that contributed to the death of Joe Ceccanti.
Sells a product that contributed to the death of Joshua Enneking.
BEST USE OF AI
Call of duty: black ops 7
As I mentioned in my previous article, some advocates for AI tools pitch them as a way for small devs with low budgets to access things they could not otherwise afford (something I rebuke in that same article), so it’s no wonder that poor little Activision had to resort to cramming so much AI slop into its latest COD release, making it the most brazen and blatant use of AI in games so far.
Look what a lack of resources can do to a legendary franchise. If only Microsoft-owned Activision Blizzard King could have some budget to work with, they wouldn’t have had to resort to such things. They wouldn’t have to fall so low. Alas, it is what it is. When you don’t have the money to pay for artists, you do what you can without them.
I would ask where the soul’s gone, but COD’s been souless for years, it’s just never been so… visual. Never so plainly laid out for us to marvel at. And isn’t it a perfect illustration of what AI is doing to games and art as a whole?
As stated in the Microsoft section, even the COD audience, who are not particularly known for caring about artistry, have widely rejected this one, and not just because of the AI slop. The use of gen AI is merely a symptom. The disease, which affects much more than these isolated elements, is an amalgamation of laziness, greed, complacency and hubris. This is what capitalism has turned our industry into: regurgitated slop, on schedule year after year, worse each time, and yet ever more expensive.
At least Satya Nadella got a $17 million pay raise this year.
GAME OF THE YEAR
Balatro
Sorry, so many clowns this year I thought it was still 2024. My bad.