College Football 25 Being Snubbed at Game Awards Is Bizarre

The 2024 Game Awards nominations came out today, and while I think another EA game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, will get most of the headlines when it comes to being snubbed, EA Sports College Football 25 being snubbed for Sports/Racing Game of the Year is just bizarre.

I can’t believe I’m coming to the defense of EA, but this is such an odd snub that I have to discuss something subjective/opinionated like the Game Awards and write that “actually your opinion is wrong,” which is something I also hate to do. It’s a double whammy of pain for me, but let’s quickly get into why this happened and why it doesn’t make sense.

First, the games that were nominated in the Sports/Racing Game category:

The award is a combination of racing and sports games — much like how we’ve always done our awards here on OS — and even if you haven’t played all these games, you should immediately recognize this isn’t exactly a list full of heavy hitters. On the other end of things, at least Veilguard came out super late in the nomination process and was going up against absolute monster games:

Three of those RPGs are also up for Game of the Year, so it’s true competition in that category. With sports and racing games, not only are most yearly games, it’s also a very small pool of titles that even came out in 2024. Due to licensing and a variety of other reasons, we don’t have the same selection of sports games to play each and every year, especially in comparison to some other genres. In other words, it’s not exactly an impressive group of games in that category.

I also know the committee that picks these nominations is a global group, and American football is obviously biggest in the US, so that is probably the biggest reason it was not selected. However, it’s still a group of folks who are well connected and should not have overlooked CFB 25.

We can discuss the “merits” of CFB 25, and this is not me defending the quality of the game so much as pointing out that other games like EA FC and F1 simply should not have made it onto the list anyway. F1 24 had serious bugs at launch, and EA FC 25 is maybe the most hated sports game of the year. I’m not even getting into the 2K games, I’m just pointing out that by basically any metric there were better EA options available.

And awards shows are not exactly always about merit anyway. Maybe they should be, but critical darlings and pieces of entertainment that sell really well also factor into awards shows — and that’s not just games, I’m talking things like movies, music, and TV as well. I could argue The Game Awards are even more commercial than most awards shows, which makes the decision even more strange when CFB 25 is one of the best-selling sports games of all-time.

And, again, maybe that has less to do with how good it is and more to do with it being the first college football game in 10 years, but a ton of people played a game that only came out on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

From a critics standpoint, it’s the second-best reviewed sports/racing game of the year and best reviewed “original” sports game of the year, which is probably an even better indicator than sales that the committee made a mistake here.

Look, the irony of a “committee” getting something wrong as it relates to college football in any form is not lost on me, and no one should lose any sleep over this sort of thing, but you still want to see the “best” games being represented at the biggest video game awards show of the year. Sports games and racing games are never going to be the draw at this sort of event, and they’ll always be “just another roster update” to many folks out there. Regardless, yearly games are a fact of life when it comes to video games, and they should still be properly recognized even if they’re not considered the pinnacle of the art form.