The BAFTA Games Awards
Posted at 22:36 on 1st May 2026 - permalink

“BAFTA believes games aren’t just one thing…”

The BAFTA Games Awards are the United Kingdom’s highest profile games awards programme. They’ve been run by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (a film industry charity) since around the turn of the century.

There are other prestigious UK games awards (handed out by trade bodies, magazines, conferences, etc.), although none of them enjoy the same level of mainstream recognition. Winning a BAFTA is something your gran would understand is a big deal.

While it may seem odd today for a creative field as commercially successful and as woven into the UK’s cultural fabric as games to farm out its biggest prize to an external party, it made perfect sense at the time.

65,000,000 B.C.

By the late 1990s video games had mostly shaken off the perception of being children’s toys and were riding a wave of rapid technological advancement. The market for games had coalesced around a viable model with vertiginous barriers to entry: full price console games sold on physical media in retail stores. 1

These conditions resulted in a handful of giant publishers carving up the market among themselves and effectively gatekeeping the kinds of games that reached the stores. (It only took a few key people deciding that games about, say, motorbikes or cooking or pirates never sold, for those ideas to remain parked for years at a time.)

Rising computing power coupled with barely-adequate distribution technology resulted in games being treated as disposable culture. When a typical game had a commercial life cycle that could be measured in weeks, 2 and the consumer expectation was for each year’s crop of new titles to render last year’s obsolete, the idea that any insight could be gleaned from revisiting or re-evaluating old games was utterly alien.

In the grim darkness of pre-millennial Britain, ubiquitous broadband was still years away. Without digital distribution, streaming video or smartphones, discovery was facilitated by specialist magazines (which boasted six-figure readerships at their peak), in-store displays and the odd TV ad. Games had to be actively sought out.

The UK games industry may have been raking in profits, but games were still an expensive niche hobby far from the cultural mainstream. (Quite like the situation Games Workshop find themselves in today.) The media ignored games except when framing them as a convenient scapegoat for society’s ills. (Not everything has changed that much.)

Games publishers looked to film and music and concluded that a glitzy awards show could help foster the positive media attention (and cultural legitimacy) games so desperately craved. Yet the upstart industry lacked the necessary expertise (or gravitas) to realise this goal without outside help.

Meanwhile at BAFTA, Lord Puttnam had just seen The 7th Guest running in Dixons (or something), and the idea was slowly dawning that these new computer gizmos represented a growing market in which their TV/film industry members could be plying their trade.

Both parties got around a table and hashed out their plan. BAFTA would mount an annual awards programme for games, 3 drawing on their decades of experience running a similar programme for film and television (a template which could be transposed onto the contemporary games industry with a few tweaks). The major publishers would support the endeavour (in terms of financial backing, and by encouraging the wider industry to submit their games and volunteer their time in judging, etc.).

The games biz would get a nationally televised showcase for their products that would finally cut through to the mainstream, while BAFTA would be able to augment their membership rolls with a whole new ‘screen industry’, helping them remain relevant in a shifting media landscape.

The programme would be deemed successful by the industry if it presented games as both state of the art technology and approachable family entertainment. It would be deemed successful by BAFTA if games were framed as perpetually needing to be measured against film to be taken seriously as a storytelling medium.

The message to the mainstream audience would be to forget the dingy amusement arcades of the 1980s, and pay attention to this cool new form of entertainment that was putting Playstations in night clubs and Lara Croft on the front of lifestyle magazines.

After a couple of ‘trial runs’ (where BAFTA worked out details like whether they should cover websites as well, and began to reach out to the industry beyond their immediate social circles), the BAFTA Games Awards hit their stride and steadily grew in scope and stature over the years to something resembling their present form.

So the die was cast. Assuming that interactive movies would remain the holy grail of game design, Moore’s Law would keep barrelling ahead at the same breakneck pace, and that games never so much as hinted at encroaching on the cultural mainstream, there was no reason to believe that the BAFTA Games Awards formula wouldn’t keep on working forever.

You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Present Day

With the benefit of a quarter century of hindsight it’s easy to spot some flaws in these assumptions.

Games now sit at the very heart of popular culture. Not everyone you meet may play games, but they are at least aware of them and could plausibly start, without needing to first seek out arcane knowledge or dedicated equipment.

The stories and aesthetics of games have become fodder for popular and well-regarded TV shows, films, exhibitions, books and music. Games provide the social spaces and cultural lexicon for engaging with the discourse. (Every other advert now talks about ‘leveling up’.) Certain games and engines have gone on to spawn vibrant creative ecosystems spanning decades, sometimes to the surprise of their creators.

That there might still be any demographic that is waiting for a nod from the arts establishment before they might consider games to be a valid use of their leisure time now seems impossibly quaint. The only people left feigning ignorance about games are British politicians and newspaper columnists, desperate to curry favour with reactionary pensioners. 4

Of course with game-capable hardware being everywhere and a range of audience demographics to serve, games are no longer wed to a single form factor and business model. And with digital distribution and better, cheaper tools toppling the barriers to entry, the number of creators producing notable work has increased by orders of magnitude.

BAFTA have continued plugging away as the ground has shifted, delivering their establishment-friendly snapshot of the medium to the satisfaction of the stakeholders. But the nagging questions of “What is BAFTA’s role in this?” 5 and “Who is this for?” have grown harder to ignore.

By certain metrics the programme is not what it once was. The ceremony hasn’t been televised for several years, and with no broadcast ad slots to fill, corporate sponsors seem to have become harder to convince. The presenters and guests tend to be drawn from lower down the celebrity hierarchy than previously. (After a long stretch with Dara Ó Briain as the host, the position is currently held by Phil Wang, who is okay 6 but isn’t – yet? – a light entertainment juggernaut like Ó Briain.)

The volume and diversity of games submitted to BAFTA has failed to keep pace with the vast growth of the medium since the programme was founded. (To be fair, nobody could have anticipated the sheer scale of outreach that would some day be required.) There have definitely been years when certain major publishers (outside of the big three) have submitted maybe one game as a token gesture or just sat the whole thing out. 7 The fee to submit a game for consideration has crept up and is no longer waived for first time applicants.

While I hardly think the BAFTA Games Awards are in any imminent danger of being shelved (BAFTA as a charity can presumably insulate them from commercial concerns to some extent, and the industry would even now prefer to avoid inviting the risk and cost of setting up an alternative from scratch), the problems of BAFTA’s somewhat narrow view of the medium and the appeal of the awards as an event are only going to get harder to work around over time.

70% Movies

BAFTA’s overall involvement in games (beyond the awards programme specifically) has been positive for the medium. Most people making games in the UK have likely benefited in some way from their efforts, even if they don’t engage with the awards aspect directly. 8

From the industry’s perspective, having BAFTA legitimise games to the establishment is helpful when lobbying for tax breaks, fair regulation, educational investment and so forth.

However the BAFTA mothership is only truly interested in a relatively limited part of the games spectrum: games that can be understood through the lens of TV and film and which are professionally relevant to their core membership. In practice this means their focus is disproportionately weighted toward:

1. Story-driven ‘blockbuster’ AAA games that employ professional actors, directors, stunt performers, crews, screenwriters, composers, etc.

2. Indie games (post their modern resurgence circa 2012) that were significant breakout commercial successes, preferably ones which involve film professionals to some extent (even if only in their marketing).

Around a quarter of the current BAFTA Games Awards categories (the acting, music and story ones) effectively exclude games outside of the first group. This advantage suits the major publishers very well. 9

BAFTA’s priorities were closely aligned with the industry’s in the beginning. Ever-growing team sizes and budgets delivering ever-higher production value was a definition of success that fit the industry’s narrative and helped maintain the status quo.

For the major publishers and platform holders, there has been a concerted effort in recent generations to try to boil games down to an easily digestible ‘ur-genre’: the undemanding story-driven action-adventure with prestige TV cutscenes. 10

The casual audience brought up on this fare demand familiar controls, opulent presentation, a checklist of features and continuous hand-holding. Even lacklustre additions to this canon can expect to be lavished with attention by BAFTA.

In 2025 Hellblade 2 was shortlisted in no fewer than 11 categories. Few serious critics would have ranked Hellblade 2 (4/10 in Edge 11 ) as one of their GOTY contenders, but it was Microsoft’s AAA+ Tentpole Release (with Weighty Dramatic Themes no less) for that sales period, so of course it was going to the ball.

Most years there are one or two games that nestle snugly into BAFTA’s ideal (expensive-feeling interactive movie fluff – a.k.a. ‘BAFTAslop’) that have the run of the shortlists. (Baldur’s Gate III, God of War Ragnarok, The Last of Us, etc.)

This year Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was the game that took on this mantle (3 wins from 12 nominations). A concerning number of the year’s top flight releases (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Baby Steps, Silksong, Absolum, Mario Kart World, Battlefield 6, Hades II, Split Fiction, Donkey Kong Bananza – and I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of others) went away empty-handed.

No shade on Expedition 33 (or the other winners), but in terms of BAFTA delivering a snapshot of outstanding works across the sector it seems like one with a pretty gigantic thumb on the lens to miss all of those.

BAFTA’s predilections ignore that the UK games scene has always been about more than just story-driven games (action/adventures and RPGs). Many of our most important and highly regarded creators have specialised in strategy, simulation, sports, puzzle and arcade games along with other enduringly popular mechanics-led genres that are steadily being reclassified as obscure niches. 12 Overlooking all of this paints an incomplete picture of what games mean here.

When it comes down to it, the stakes are not very high for BAFTA to be seen as an authority on games. The BAFTA Games Awards are after all a literal sideshow for them. Their success of failure doesn’t pose any kind of existential reputational threat to BAFTA in toto. Dame Judi Dench isn’t going to tear up her membership card in protest when Jeff Minter gets snubbed yet again. 13

(And while I want to again stress that BAFTA are executing the awards programme perfectly competently, there have been a few episodes of carelessness over the years – such as taking decades to present an award to the intended recipient, pulling a game from a showcase reel at the last minute, or repeatedly misnaming a winning game in the event brochure – that probably wouldn’t happen on their home turf.)

The Pachinko Machine

As the games BAFTA chooses (or its structure allows it) to celebrate fall further out of alignment with the core audience’s interests, the show becomes harder to market as an event, to both viewers and potential honorees.

The priorities I’ve described above (big budgets, cinematic conventions, ignorance of historical context) heavily stack the odds against many critically acclaimed games from being recognised.

For a long time, almost any game with abstract (especially pixel art) graphics or chiptune music was automatically assumed to be a nostalgia act and put at a severe disadvantage. (The music category provides good examples of this: Undertale failed to even secure a nomination for its soundtrack that year, presumably as it is not trying to be a film score. Few other game soundtracks from around that time are still regularly performed live.)

This attitude is slowly starting to improve as the memory of the era when technological advancement was the only yardstick of progress fades, but its echoes are still felt.

BAFTA’s award categories have gradually evolved, rightly deciding to do away with genre- and platform-based divisions, but the kinds of games that would have been showcased in many of those categories haven’t always been folded into the remaining ones. (For instance sports, fighting, racing and strategy games are now essentially gone.)

Certain eligibility criteria that were originally necessary to keep the volume of submissions manageable are now routinely excluding important games, now that not all games manifest as discrete full price home console releases.

Remakes and remasters are subject to limited eligibility. This has created a chilling effect around anything that could be even loosely interpreted as a ‘remaster’ (e.g., an obviously fully original sequel to a long-running series, such as Streets of Rage IV).

MachineGames (consistently one of the top studios in the world making cinematic story games over the past 15 years) have never won a BAFTA. After all, games with Wolfenstein in the title must be nostalgic cash-ins for the retro age of bleeps and bloops. Not ‘legitimate’ games storytelling, like The Last of Us. 14

Expansions (DLC) and mods (UGC) of existing games are also largely excluded. This resulted in a ridiculous situation in 2024 where BAFTA had to bend their rules to give Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty a single nomination in the Evolving Game category (and then immediately closed that loophole the following year!).

There is no route by which notable works delivered as mods (like MyHouse.wad) could ever get onto BAFTA’s radar. Games that suffered significant teething troubles at launch (Cyberpunk 2077 15 ) generally lose their chance of ever being recognised (outside of the Evolving Game backstop).

When we factor in the practical considerations that affect all games awards with volunteer juries (game length, difficulty, interface familiarity, etc.) we start to see that a worryingly high proportion of perfectly good games aren’t making it through this pachinko machine.

(I’ve not even opened the enormous can of worms that is subject matter: suffice to say those original objectives of the programme outlined above aren’t concerned with games having any kind of message more challenging than might be found in an airport paperback.)

But even if a game were fortunate enough to pass all these tests (none of which have any bearing on quality), it still might not be enough. We still have to deal with the final boss (video games joke) that is the member vote system.

The Will of The People

The member vote system was originally (and perfectly reasonably) intended as a way of shielding the selection process from manipulation.

By filtering submitted games at key points in the process by having the entire BAFTA games membership vote on them, they would help to ensure that the majority of games that made it to the final stages were familiar to the audience, ensuring there were lots of games whose fanbases would tune in to see how they fared in each category.

(In the very early days when BAFTA knew little about games, the hypothetical situation of a relatively unknown game being pushed through the system by an unscrupulous publisher seeking an easy PR win was probably something they were anxious to avoid.)

Now that there is a vast disparity between the marketing reach of AAA blockbuster games and everything else, the member vote system simply acts as a suffocating enforcer of mediocrity. If your small-to-medium indie game hasn’t been the subject of endless viral LinkedIn ‘analyses’ (due to exceptional Steam chart performance), or your AAA retail release isn’t a known quantity (ideally supported by a major outdoor advertising campaign), you might as well save yourself the submission fee.

The member vote system is used to decide which of the submitted games make it through to the longlist for each category. For most of the categories the nominees and ultimate winner are then decided by an expert jury. 16

In recent years (immediately after Vampire Survivors won Best Game, coincidentally), member voting has also been brought in to decide the nominees as well as the winner(!) of both the Best Game and British Game categories. This is completely demented.

If memory serves, some years back member voting was dropped as the means of deciding the Best Game winner in favour of a jury deliberation specifically because it kept returning extremely dull, safe winners (such as Destiny, Fallout 4 and Uncharted 4).

Sure enough, as soon as the member vote mechanism was brought back, the Best Game went to Baldur’s Gate III – a giant prestige TV-styled blockbuster sequel based on a decades-old fantasy IP. The obvious safe choice, the epitome of BAFTAslop. A choice that if it were any nearer the middle of the road Wile E. Coyote would be pouring birdseed on it. This is precisely the kind of result the system is designed to produce and will presumably now continue to do.

Is there anything so wrong with holding a vote among a large group of industry professionals? I am not privy to a statistical breakdown of the BAFTA games membership. But membership is hardly cheap, 17 and it’s primarily marketed (consciously or not) to senior studio staff and business owners – over professional critics, academics and specialist experts at any rate. They are likely to be somewhat older than the audience average (for better or worse). Their priorities and the criteria by which they assess game quality will be different.

I’m sure a proportion of that member base are actively consuming modern games as one of their main hobbies and at least trying to hone their critical taste. 18 But they also collectively once gave Best Game to Fallout 4. 19

One must assume that the awards programme is under pressure to show that all games members can be meaningfully involved with the process, for member voting to be relied on this extensively when the infinitely preferable option of jury panels is right there.

The Future

How do we get from this situation to an awards programme where all creators are enthused to submit their games, knowing that they might have a shot even if they’re not Naughty Dog (or similar)? Where the winners build year on year into a pantheon that accurately reflects the vibrant state of the medium rather than just telling us which was the shiniest gewgaw that ticked all the BAFTAslop boxes in a given year?

Realistically, we probably can’t – the amount of inertia working against changing any long-running system in the UK (unless it’s obviously broken, and even then we’ll probably drag our heels for a few decades) is far too great.

Assuming there was ever enough of a groundswell of public and industry sentiment to prompt action, we can probably still forget about launching a direct competitor. There isn’t enough space in the market for two programmes like this to run in parallel. For the sake of an easy life, the industry powers would give the newcomer the same treatment UK high street retailers gave the GameCube.

As I see it, the awards organisation itself is perfectly serviceable – the key thing preventing it from being more effective is having to operate under the aegis of BAFTA.

Getting shot of the ‘pay-to-play’ member vote system, assessing games on their own merits (what thought-provoking and genuinely original things do they accomplish with the medium, rather than merely how well they can ape film and/or generate revenue), targeting the show primarily at the vast audience that appreciates games (rather than the narrow establishment that will forever regard games with suspicion), and – crucially – finding someone cooler than Phil Wang to host it, 20 are all baseline requirements which remain out of reach while still yoked to BAFTA.

So is there a way for the awards programme to be divested from BAFTA? Again I suspect not, but I do think it warrants further investigation. It would be tricky to structure such a process in a way that means no party loses face. BAFTA’s brand and cultural cachet are a major asset, and it would be expensive and risky to try to develop a new, independent alternative.

Perhaps a multi-year process whether the BAFTA branding is slowly phased out (one stage being shunting the best performer category into the TV/Film awards?) would sugar the pill. I think BAFTA membership would still represent a good value proposition for games people even separated from the awards, although I suppose some thought would need to go into promoting or expanding the other benefits to compensate.

I think there ultimately needs to be a non-profit games-native organisation in charge of running the top UK games awards programme. For a while it looked like there was going to be a British Games Institute, but that seems to have gone quiet. Some new entity specifically set up for this purpose is probably needed. (In a normal rich country there would be arts funding for this.)

I’m no expert in the business of running awards programmes, but I note that finding a big, reliable long-term sponsor outside of the sector has worked for other entertainment industry awards without ruining their credibility. (e.g., the Mercury Music Prize or the Perrier Award.) I would tolerate slapping some random bank (other than Barclays obviously) or telco’s name in the title if that was what it took to fund things adequately.

In fact, who’s to say if we were to give it the most boring and generic official title possible (e.g., “The British Video Game Awards”) a nickname wouldn’t organically emerge?

Something that evokes the idea that games are not separate from UK culture. That we’re proud of our games development heritage rather than constantly pursuing greater spectacle. That we appreciate how games can be used to tell stories, but they’re participatory stories and conventionally structured narrative is but one tool in their arsenal to make us think and feel and create memories. Above all that we’re funny.

One game from recent years springs to mind that perfectly encapsulates all of that, and it was (of course) entirely overlooked by BAFTA, coming from a tiny developer and publisher and failing to create any ripples in the wider culture. It even has a little golden man as a mascot.

Never mind the BAFTAs, here’s The Horaces.

  1. While we now think of the ’90s as a golden age for PC games as well, their relative cost and complexity as a hobby meant that they accounted for a sliver of the overall market during that time. [↩]
  2. Very few games had a long tail. The typical situation was for a game to do most of its business almost immediately after launch, after which the demand for shelf space (and, depending on the platform, casual piracy) would see sales quickly tail off. Budget labels and OEM bundling acted as secondary markets. [↩]
  3. It should be noted that the BAFTA Games Awards were conceived as a bona fide awards programme from the outset. While other awards shows might just be a flimsy pretense for an animatronic trust fund boy to pretend that they’re a human celebrity for one night of the year, BAFTA have always put a similar degree of care and professionalism into organising their game awards as they do their TV and Film awards. (Erm, as they do most years, I mean.) [↩]
  4. Millennial MPs will continue to awkwardly act as though they’ve never encountered a computer before until the last of The Telegraph’s readership have died off. [↩]
  5. BAFTA have retroactively justified their involvement in games by framing them as a ‘third pillar’ alongside TV and film under the umbrella term of ‘screen arts’.

    This doesn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny. Games sharing some delivery technology with television is a historical accident rather than a meaningful common trait between the mediums. While there are certainly some game genres where there is substantial crossover, there are many others where borrowing from film and TV is not relevant at all.

    In an alternate universe where CRTs were popularised for games first with radio-with-pictures falling out as a secondary benefit decades later, it would not make sense to discuss TV shows based on how heavily they overlapped with games.

    In the modern era all of these ‘screen arts’ are primarily delivered through our phones anyway, but nobody is suggesting an umbrella term of ‘phone arts’ that expands to include every other form of culture we engage with through our devices. [↩]

  6. He’s the perfect avatar for BAFTA really – cheerily inoffensive with a slight whiff of privilege. [↩]
  7. Put yourself in Konami or Capcom or Ubisoft’s shoes. Globally there are a plethora of games awards programmes vying for publishers’ time. Given finite resources does it make sense to bother with ones where the odds of winning drop off precipitously if your games don’t fit a fairly narrow band of genres and where there is often a single high profile favourite swamping the nominations? [↩]
  8. I count myself among these beneficiaries. While I’ve never been a BAFTA member I’ve been invited to judge twice, and have attended the awards a few times along with plenty of other events they’ve organised over the years. I’ve also been part of at least one studio that has won a BAFTA (for Best Mobile Game in 2004). Did you know that according to BAFTA’s rules you aren’t supposed to describe yourself individually as a “BAFTA winner” if the award in question was presented to a team? Something to think about when next updating your LinkedIn profile! [↩]
  9. With the notable exception of Nintendo, for whom the ‘Family Game’ category is seemingly retained as a consolation prize to ensure that they (usually) don’t go away empty handed, even while it’s heavily implied that their wildly successful yet conspicuously uncinematic games are considered by BAFTA to be children’s toys and not serious contenders for the main awards categories. [↩]
  10. Often with their playing time padded out to at least forty hours by way of stock open world activities like collecting and crafting. [↩]
  11. Okay, the average on Metacritic is not quite as damning, but it’s buoyed by a whole bunch of Xbox outlets starved of big ticket first party games as well as rookie reviewers dazzled by graphical spectacle. [↩]
  12. Almost every modern retelling of the history of PC games frames FPS and point-‘n’-click games as the only commercially successful genres in the 1980s and 90s.The genres that made up the bulk of sales – such as simulation games and RPGs – are memory holed. History is written by the aspiring screenwriters. [↩]
  13. Llamasoft has continually put out critically and commercially successful (and unmistakably British) games for over 40 years at this point, to the establishment’s total indifference. [↩]
  14. A portentous sweatshop-manufactured pastiche of The Road that exists purely as a justification for grisly, dehumanising violence. (Five BAFTA wins, ten nominations.) It’s remains a real shame that more people haven’t played Wolfenstein The New Order, a game which actually has something to say and by the standards of a popcorn AAA actioner feels genuinely subversive in parts. [↩]
  15. Someone might point out that most of the games I’m using as examples in this post are ones that I like personally. To which I say: It’s my website. If I had been commissioned to write a report about this I’d use a broader data set. [↩]
  16. With the occasional TV presenter, eSports pundit, influencer, etc. thrown in depending on who the prevailing wisdom of the day dictates knows more about games than veteran developers and professional critics.

    But seriously folks, the juries are made up of relevant experts. The jury panels are published every year, if you’re curious to see the impressively broad range of people involved. [↩]

  17. By way of comparison, membership of L’académie des arts et techniques du jeu vidéo which runs the direct equivalent awards programme (Pégases) for the industry in France, is open to all industry members, and free. [↩]
  18. It’s important to note that jury panels aren’t limited to only being picked from BAFTA members. It’s only the member vote system – and specifically its suitability for deciding the winners in the headline categories – I’m discussing here. [↩]
  19. MGSV, Batman Arkham Knight and The Witcher 3 all came out that year so it can hardly be argued to have been an uncontested field. [↩]
  20. Hard to imagine I know. [↩]


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