It's been almost two years of tumult and 'normalcy' interruption. IRL has been replaced with Zoom and Teams and Discord, while presentations and 'live events' have been moved to a less challenging and more accessible (and cheaper) digital platform, over the obviously more time-consuming live option. But we've all had to make that transition, and in the videogame space, adoption of this has been all-consuming. Just ask The Game Awards architect, Geoff Keighley, who will readily tell you the near double jump in viewership for last year's event due to lockdown is a perfect example of this industry's ability to adapt. But he'll also spruik his decision to go back to a IRL event for 2021.

“I think we all felt that it was great that we did that, but we really missed the energy of people accepting their awards live and the reactions and all that type of stuff,” he says of taking TGAS back to its spiritual home of the Microsoft Theatre in Downtown, Los Angeles. "This year, there'll be a lot of content for 2022 and 2023 that will be showing us our kind of biggest lineup yet of world premieres and announcements. What we really learnt last year was at the end of the day, it really is the games and the trailers that drive the show.”

Currently the show is said to be featuring between 40 and 50 titles in some form or another, with the next two years on offer as far as projection and hype-direction are concerned, which is a lot. By comparison, there were 25 games featured in updated, premier or world premier form last year. Keighley has also revealed not all trailers or debuts this year will be strictly videogames, instead we'll also see more from the adaptation world that is beginning to blossom, with TV series, anime, movies and more all now vying for a slice of the videogame juggernaut.

The Game Awards 2021, of which AusGamers is part of the judging panel, will air on most streaming platforms on December 9. And keep checking back with us as we close in on this year's event, which promises not only to be a celebration of games and gaming culture, but of returning back to a life of some normalcy, which is something I think we can all get behind.