Sports awards have historically had bad "final" announcements, fans find

Since last month's presentation of The Game Awards, much attention has been focused on the upcoming live-service hero shooter Highguard, which had the unfortunate fate of being announced as the “last” at the show that saw the return of Mega Man, a new Casey Hudson-led Star Wars title, and Divinity Revealed.

Things haven't been helped by its studio's radio silence since the reveal, though it was later reported that Highguard didn't actually pay to make the “final” announcement.

related to

It's good that no one is talking about Highguard

No news is good news.

However, as one sleuthy gamer discovered, Highguard isn't alone in having a “disappointing” final announcement at the annual year-end awards show. In fact, historically speaking, the final announcement at the Game Awards has been pretty common.

Once you've seen these titles, Highguard doesn't deserve any feedback

Over on Reddit, a user compiled the final announcements for each of the last 10 editions of The Game Awards, and outside of a few rare examples, it's a rather disappointing bunch.

Over the past decade, here's the latest revealed:

2025 – Highguard
2024 – Intergalactic: Heretic Prophet
2023 – Monster Hunter Wilds
2022 – Final Fantasy 16 Release Date Trailer
2021 – The Matrix Awakens: Unreal Engine Tech Demo
2020 – Mass Effect
2019 – Fast and Furious Crossroads
2018 – Dead by Daylight DLC
2017 – Metro Exodus
2016 – Mass Effect Andromeda
2015 – The Walking Dead: Michonne

The Walking Dead: Michonne Experience hit right when Telltale fatigue was at an all-time high, and wasn't very well received to boot. Mass Effect Andromeda was heavily criticized at launch and sits at a 5.1 user score on Metacritic.

Metro Exodus is a great game, indeed, but certainly not “end game” worthy, especially since Breath of the Wild's DLC and Death Stranding were both trailers. DLC isn't exactly “wow,” for a live-action multiplayer game.

Where things get really interesting is 2019 with Fast & Furious Crossroads, a title currently listed with a 35 critic score on Metacritic. We've yet to see anything concrete from the next Mass Effect, and like Fast & Furious before it, the Matrix demo no longer exists. It was also a huge advertisement for both the bad Matrix movie and Unreal.

While we've been waiting a while for the potential Heretic Prophet, FF 16 was great and MH Wilds was solid on launch. That leaves Highguard as our most recent announcement and most mocked.

We'll let you be the judge when it comes to that, but if you ask me, more than half of the announcements didn't turn out well. This makes Highguard's situation even more shocking. The game might look interesting, sure, but for many it's unfounded to pretend that the “final” spot is some annual game-changer.