Hogwarts Legacy’s complete absence from The Game Awards was enough to set this Twitch streamer off. Liric gave his thoughts on his most recent Just Chatting stream.
Hogwarts Legacy was one of the most explosive games of 2023. It dominated the news cycle in the months before its release thanks to the controversy and polarization that surrounds J.K Rowling.
What essentially amounted to free marketing for the game caused Hogwarts Legacy to become a top-seller on Steam weeks before its release and the most-watched game in Twitch history at launch.
So, how did a game with such cultural impact, even outside of the hardcore gaming space, not get a single nomination for the 2023 Game Awards? Twitch streamer Lirik can’t seem to find an answer and it’s caused a little bit of a meltdown.
Perhaps in a bit of selective remembering or algorithm-based blindness, Liric claimed that when Hogwarts Legacy was released “everybody was playing it… It was on all social media and everyone was enjoying it,” he explained. “No one was like ‘this game f**king sucks’.”
Aside from a pretty substantial boycott of the game, there were some complaints about Hogwarts Legacy from fans of the game. Users in a post on r/LivestreamFail that shared the clip were happy to remind Liric of them.
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“I finished Hogwarts Legacy. They built the whole f**king castle with f**k all to do in it,” one player shared. Another user agreed saying the roleplaying aspect can be fun “but the second you actually start playing the game, you realize how dull it is”.
Liric seemed more focused on the nostalgic elements of Hogwarts Legacy and was baffled that it wasn’t “part of the list” for GOTY nominations. “Who doesn’t like going to a f**king magic school and eating f**king frog chocolate?” he asked his audience.
Some players in his stream chat speculated that the initial controversy surrounding the game may have kept it from being nominated at the Game Awards. Suggestions that the panel was “afraid” of potential backlash.
A far more likely reason is that 2023 was an extraordinarily packed year and Hogwarts Legacy was outshined by its competition. Starfield was also a massively popular title that only landed a single nomination in a highly competitive year for gaming.
