Predicting the 2023 GOTY

When it comes to releasing new games there’s always quite a bit of tension around where Metacritic scores are going to land.

We at Loading Screen decided to cut-and-dice the numbers from some of the most critically acclaimed games so far in 2023 to see if we can see a consensus Game of the Year.

Let’s get into it.

Examining the frontrunners

We took a straw poll among the Loading Screen writers to come up with a short list of potential GOTY candidates and ended up with the following:

• Baldur’s Gate 3

• Starfield

• Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

• Dave the Diver

• Sea of Stars

• Diablo IV

• Armored Core VI

• Final Fantasy XVI

• Hogwarts Legacy

Our first step was to pull up the distribution of Metacritic scores:

The box represents the middle 50% of reviews. The line ends are the min and max.

Highlights

• Right off the bat, it’s pretty clear that it will likely come down to TotK vs. BG3 — high median score and tight clustering.

• With all the hype, Starfield is actually one of the two most polarizing titles (the other being FF XVI). We’re pretty sure it’s not a serious contender at this point.

• It seems like pretty much everyone loves Dave the Diver (big win for indie gaming!) given the tightest distribution in the group. Too bad the score is a notch below the cream of the crop.

Head-to-head: TotK vs. BG3

So, with our high-level view out of the way, we started taking a closer look at TotK and BG3 with a head-to-head comparison:

From this preliminary cut, we see that there’s about 40% more critics that believe TotK is superior to BG3.

It’s important to note, however, that 40% of critics scored them equally — this is the issue with a scoring system with a max score that seems to be hit increasingly often as 80% of ties were the result of a perfect 100 for both games.

So, it seems like TotK is looking pretty strong… but, can we go further with the data?

Yup, sure can! We know that the GOTY award is determined through the aggregate of a jury vote (90% of weight) and a public vote (remaining 10%). The 2023 jury is already publicly listed.

We can then cross-reference this list with the Metacritic review data to arrive at filtered data from confirmed jury members:

With this focused view we see that TotK pulls away even further — more than double the decided ‘votes’ than BG3.

Of course, we’re just dealing with a sample of the Jury — 26/~100. Plus, 13 are ‘undecided’, so there’s no sure thing.

What about that 10% from the fan vote?

Well, BG3 actually has a higher user score, at 8.9 with 10.5K reviews compared to TotK’s 8.1 at 9.6K.

But the fan vote really comes down to a popularity contest. TotK sold 18.5M copies as of June this year. Meanwhile, BG3 has racked up 5.2M units on Steam already. Even with the impending console launches, it’s hard to imagine BG3 eclipsing the TotK’s sales volume with a 13M unit gap.

Our prediction: TotK will take Game of the Year

The combination of the strong performance from a sample of this year’s Jury + a larger fan base and broader appeal results in TotK being the horse we’d bet on.

What do you think, do we have it right?

We’ll find out together on December 7th.

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Limitations:

• While reviews are often written by a single editor, a single Jury vote is billed as the representative vote for the entire publication — as such, a publication may change their mind come decision time

Notes:

• We used critic scores from Metacritic and did not use user scores

• Where there are distinct scores by console for a title, we chose the PC reviews

• Metacritic aggregate scores are algorithmically weighted by critic. Our analysis is unweighted