The Game Awards is a yearly awards show for video games that were released during the year. The event is hosted by none other than game journalist Geoff Keighley. Its first event was in 5 December 2014, with an expansion towards including board games starting in 2019.

At the beginning of the event, an ad for the extraction shooter Arc Raiders was shown with the tagline: “Arc tuah, Raid on that thang”. This received major push back from the audience, to the point where they had to delay the whole show for 2 minutes and 14 seconds.

Before showing a specific World Premiere, Keighley expressed how honored he was to be the one to reveal the new title in a long dormant franchise. People were expecting to see the grand return to the highly anticipated Mega Man 3, only to be met with a teaser trailer for Half-Life: Dual Override. Mega Man fans were furious, expressing how Half-Life was not deserving of the description he gave. This is despite the fact that the last mainline Half-Life game was Half-Life 11 in 2018, whereas the last mainline Mega Man game was Mega Man: Roll in 2020.

The “Best Fictional Character” award featured a major and polarizing upset, with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 winning over the much beloved Glonpo. Many fans of the latter however still accepted this as his win, pointing out how the industry needed an entire game just to dethrone a single character.