Cyberpunk 2077 Won “Best of Gamescom” and Several Other Awards (Update)

Okay, so we already had an entire discussion about Gamescom awards and Cyberpunk 2077 when they got the “Best Sony PlayStation Game” award a couple of days ago.

We discuss the implications behind nominating and awarding an unreleased game as a “best game” of any kind, and you can read about it all in this post, but as it turns out… the story doesn’t end here. Now the Gamescom event is over, and we have a full list of Cyberpunk 2077‘s awards, and… there are quite a few.

Including, simply, Best Overall.

#gamescom is not the same without being able to meet all of you in person. Still, we couldn’t be more grateful. We’ll grab a drink at the Afterlife now. Cheers & many thanks! https://t.co/pZZ96tKQzi

– Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) August 30, 2020

Here are all of the Gamescom awards for Cyberpunk 2077:

• Best Sony PlayStation Game
• Best PC Game
• Best Role-Playing Game
• Best of Gamescom
• Gamescom “Most Wanted” Consumer Award

Alright, the last one certainly makes a lot of sense and I have nothing to challenge the wild anticipation the game has caused, but what about the others?

If players were confused about the PlayStation award given to Cyberpunk 2077, they were certainly confused about the others. “Best of Gamescom”? “Best RPG”? Many fans, even those eagerly waiting for the game’s release in November, agreed that it deserves due recognition, but not awards that treat it as a full game. So what is going on?

We offered a few points of discussion last time, including our thoughts about the community voting system, but we will add one more crucial detail to this one.

Gamescom Jury Members Had Early Access to Cyberpunk 2077

To be fair: some of the jury members work for @USK_de – the German age rating board. While we don’t know what they have voted for we do know that they have played a content complete version of Cyberpunk 2077. A lot.

– Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) August 30, 2020

It was at least a bit a little bold for CD Projekt Red to step ahead and point out this potential “insider’s bias.” Certainly, if someone connected to Gamescom had this kind of an access to the game, it would generate a lot of insider discussion.

This part could explain the Best of Gamescom results, even if it continues to upset some of the gamers arguing that the exclusive early access doesn’t constitute a fully released game. The community-voted part, of course, still stands as a discussion on its own. Really, it’s a complicated topic of discussion concerning a resounding award coming from a major online event. If you would like to hear more about our take on it, we definitely have both positive and negative things to say about this in our older article.

What is clear and clearly so pointed out by Cyberpunk 2077 fans, CDPR is handling the attention pretty well, gaining more trust from the community as its reach only grows. While you probably saw an ad or two about the game on websites like YouTube, you would probably agree that ultimately Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t even need advertising at this point. It created its own culture within the gaming community, selling its pre-orders to people who have never believed in pre-orders. Some even made serious income sacrifices to purchase it, simply due to how much they believed in the game and its developers.

If Cyberpunk 2077 can draw so much attention to itself as is… the response it will generate once it is released will probably be an incredible sight.