The Game Awards: We Used Data to Predict the Winners

ign.com:

The Game Awards 2022 are just one day away, and one of the big discussions every year surrounds which game will win the final award of the night: Game of the Year.

This year, the nominees are A Plague Tale: Requiem, Elden Ring, God of War Ragnarok, Horizon Forbidden West, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Even though IGN's own Best Game of 2022 nominees differ, we thought it would be interesting to use audience data from our coverage of the five Game of the Year nominees to predict what game will walk away with the award on Thursday night.

IGN Data Analyst Eric Zalewski compiled the data used for this experiment. We used a combination of data from IGN.com, IGN's YouTube, Steam, and other sources to determine which games were the most popular with gamers throughout the year. It's worth noting that winners for The Game Awards are determined largely by gaming outlets rather than the audience, but we still thought it'd be fun to see what the IGN audience thinks. Read on to find out our projected winners in about a dozen different categories for this year's Game Awards.

While there are plenty of great games to look forward to in 2023, this contest wasn't even that close. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom destroyed the competition, with its trailer attracting the most attention from our audience. And, Tears of the Kingdom articles drew nearly double the readership as the second place finisher, Hogwarts Legacy.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was easily the most popular adaptation among these choices for the IGN audience. If you combine all of the views of these five nominees, Sonic 2 accounted for almost exactly half of them. Those Sonic fans are a passionate bunch.

Based on readership numbers for IGN's reviews of these five games, Modern