Capping off what was widely agreed upon to be a very good year for gaming, the organizers of the 18th-annual Game Developers Choice Awards have announced the 2018 nominees. The winners will be announced at a ceremony in San Francisco’s Moscone Center on March 21 during the 2018 Game Developers Conference (GDC). Robin Hunicke — game designer, University of California, Davis professor, and Funomena co-founder — will host the ceremony.
Digital Trends 2017 Game of the Year The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn lead the pack with a commanding six GDC Award nominations each, including Game of the Year. The other nominees for the top honor are populated by some of our other favorite games from the last year: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Nier: Automata, and Super Mario Odyssey, with honorable mentions for Cuphead, What Remains of Edith Finch, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Night in the Woods, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Persona 5, and Gorogoa. You can see the full list of nominees and honorable mentions — including Best Audio, Debut, Design, Mobile Game, Innovation, Narrative, Technology, Visual Art, VR/AR Game, and Game of the Year — here. You can peruse a full archive of previous nominees and winners here.
The ceremony will also include the Lifetime Achievement, Ambassador, and Pioneer awards, whose nominees will be announced “in the near future.” Online voting for the Audience Award will open in late January. The nominees and winners of the main awards are voted for by members of the International Choice Awards Network (ICAN), an invite-only body of leading video game industry professionals, along with an Advisory Board and the editors of gaming industry website Gamasutra.
Sharing the same venue on March 21 are the Independent Game Festival Awards, whose finalists were also recently announced. Finnish developer Arvi “Hempuli” Teikari’s Baba is You, a fourth-wall-breaking puzzle where the game’s rules physically exist in the game such that the player can manipulate them, leads the nomination count with nods for Excellence in Design, Best Student Game, the Nuovo Award, and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. Infinite Falls’ charming narrative game Night in the Woods and the maddeningly masochistic Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy were also featured prominently.
