The Game Awards did, technically, give out awards, but it's often insulting the creators it's claiming to honor by sidelining them for celebrities and ads.
I watch it annually (for the game reveals and occasional Warframe announcements, and it's just 1 night a year). It's just been trailers interspersed with awards, celeb cameos, and the odd live performance for a while now. Not sure why people get upset about it, apart from being mad their game didn't get X award. It's never gonna be the Oscar's, and I don't want it to be. I want Kojima to come on stage and ramble about his new game for 10 minutes without actually saying shit.
Edit: I read the article and they make fair points. They're right that it should give more time to creators to make an acceptance speech. And the Muppets thing is always just odd.
Yeah. Some people watch the awards for the trailers too. Like I'll be honest, I don't really care much about who won what at this point. As far as I'm concerned, as long as people like David "I don't make games for f-ggots" Cage or Quantic Dream (David "I'm so misogynistic I drove Elliot Page out of the closet" Cage's company) are still eligible to receive awards then the game awards don't actually mean anything. I just like the trailers and was very excited about Sega's announcement.
Edit: I'd read somewhere that Elliot Page said that David Cage was one of the contributing factors to him deciding to publicly come out as a trans man, or something along those lines, but I can't find it now so I might be thinking of someone else?
It wasn't great, but expecting great from this would be like expecting actual game industry insights from E3 in the latter half of its life. They've been slowly easing out of some of the egregious things they do, even, like advertising 'robots'
I will say that some of the speeches were extremely rushed for the amount of fluff they have in there, and I didn't care for all the rapid fire "no one cares about these" awards. I'd actually like more expounding on some of them, like talk more about game soundtracks, audio design, accessibility, and "impact" in their categories. You could probably fit this in just from cutting out each time someone said 'world premiere.'
They've succeeded in at least giving 'Game of the Year' a point of reference, even if every game in the world can get a Game of the Year edition. They'll have to try much harder if they want it to be the prestigious event they're dressing up as.
I 'watched' it on YouTube after it had finished. Thankfully so as I ended up skipping though the majority of it. It felt like one big advert with content in certain places where they had room between trailers.