First of all, Ace Combat 8 was revealed at the TGA, it’s a simulator-lite, but still a simulator.
Of course, that’s besides the point, unless you’re telling me it’s ok for The Game Awards to nominate only games that pay them to put trailers on.
That’d also be besides the point, mind you, because the nominations are decided by journalists and influencers in the jury, and if gaming journalists are ignorant about a non-insignificant chunk of the industry, that’s on them, not on the developers. Finding out about games is their *job.* Not that most of them do it well, unfortunately, but that’s exactly part of my point. The ignorance of the genre displayed by mainstream gaming media is inexcusable.
If simulators are so niche and invisible, how is it that big mainstream IPs work with them? Microsoft Flight Simulator just had an insanely good Stranger Things crossover, and a Jurassic World one just a month or so ago. They also had Dune and Top Gun: Maverick.
I don’t know many *mainstream* games out there that line up that kind of high-level collabs.
Ultimately, the problem is simple, and not very nice to say. 99% of mainstream gaming journalism nowadays is SEO-driven trash (and I know this for a fact). It isn’t surprising that those who work on it (and get to vote for nominations and awards) don’t know what’s beyond two inches from their noses.
They don’t write about the games they’re passionate about. They write what their SEO dude behind the scenes tells them to write, so their industry expertise, if it ever existed, has long been forgotten.
